I need to pay an eBay seller who has a personal PayPal account only. This means he cannot accept credit card funded payments. So instead, I funded my own account using a bank transfer from my own bankaccount. Supposedly, this is totally free.

This was the first time I ever did this. The result is totally incomprehensible. Both my bankaccount and my PayPal account are held in Euro. Still, the transaction lists two currency conversions, one from EUR to USD and then back again to EUR.

Stiil there is no loss in these transactions. But after adding EUR 121,- to my account, my account only shows a balance of EUR 115,02. No explanation whatsoever where the rest is!

Obviously, I still cannot pay the seller, unless I choose credit card as the funding.

Has anyone seen this before? What's the explanation? I asked PayPal too, but received no answer.

Pim

I think I found the problem. Even though my PayPal account is held in Euro
(you cannot choose otherwise), my primary balance was in US Dollars.

So funding in Euro and then paying in Euro would involve two extra currency
conversions, each of which are charged at about 2.5%. This adds up.

I changed my primary balance to Euro (and thus took a loss of EUR 5,98),
and transferred another the remainder of the money from my bankaccount.
Hopefully this will now arrive in one piece

I think my account was in US Dollars, because when I joined PayPal,
PayPal Europe did not exist yet. When Paypal Europe started, they said
everything would be converted to Euro automatically, but now it appears
this was not the case.

Pim

Here in Canada (lumped in with everyone else outside of the USA I suspect), if one looks really close, one can create "extra" currency balances on an account to hold non-USA and/or non-CAD$ balances.. this may help in your case; or not.

Paypal is very USA-centric. They just don't know any better.

Cheers

In case the significance of this is unclear in the US, It's very difficult to find anyone in Holland who doesn't speak better English than you (Except the newspaper seller on Delft Railway station). If you ask: "do you speak English" of a Dutch person, they look at you as though you've used the worst of all swearwords! - So to have everything translated into Dutch, when you're trying to deal internationally, must be very frustrating.

eBay owns PayPal, so I don't doubt you'll see further integration and adoption of operational practises/methodologies.

I'm in Canada and don't have a problem browsing in either Canadian or US dollars - but I generally do that by hitting the .com or .ca pages directly. Both are in English, so I don't know how a language preference would be dealt with. I'd think .ca has French support though.


They've always had a problem tracking preferences/state. Comes from the fact that their system was (is) based on a free (open) auction platform. You might still be able to find some other sites running the original software that look surprisingly like the early eBay. They've come a long way, but have taken their sweet time. A lot still to do to improve the user experience.

Bruno