I want to open and online store. I live in India, I will manage website and everything from India but my target customers are from Turkey. I want to integrate Paypal international payment for my website. But when my customers want to make payment in Turkish currency, PayPal is asking for PayPal account, not accepted for credit and debit card.
Turkish currency payment is not supported by credit and debit cards. That's why I'm thinking to fix the prices in US Dollars for selling the items from my website. Do you think that I can sell my items by US dollar in Turkey and credit and debit card option can work like this?
Short answer: you need to understand what country/jurisdiction "you" -- meaning whoever is in business here -- is in and then look up and abide by the policies (from the governments and from PayPal, which is subject to those governments). Then you can determine how currency will interact with that.
While the specific answers to these questions will change over time as regulation and products change, right now you are basically out of luck accepting PayPal payments with an Indian company due to PayPal's inability to operate in line with government regulations there. A Turkish company would not face the same issues (PayPal operates and offers more services in Turkey) but would be subject to other issues. And if you are not sure what country you are or should be operating in you need a business lawyer not a StackOverflow crowdsourced opinion :).
Changing the currency of the transaction to USD does not affect the nationality of the company (or individual) conducting the ecommerce. In some cases USD may avoid some regulations or issues, but in other cases it can introduce very serious issues (many countries,such as China, seriously restrict their citizens' ability to deal in nonlocal currency).
Related
I’m specifically asking about the Currency dropdown menu setting in the Shipping Calculations (Paypal's Payments Standard):
Screengrab here
If, for example, I’m selling an item on my website priced at 10 Euro, but I have set separate shipping prices for ‘Euro' and 'British Pounds', will a buyer paying in British Pounds be charged the different shipping rates I’ve set?
Or, will the British Pounds settings only be used if I’m selling in British Pounds?
So Paypal eventually responded:
I am sorry if there has been any confusion regarding your query. I have double-checked you query and have tested this myself.
The postage calculations can only be set to one currency, for example Euros or Pounds. This section will not allow for different calculations depending on which country or currency the funds have been received from.
I m planning to integrate micropayment in my ASP.NET website. I need to use PayPal to achieve this.
The cost of the service I deliver is low, about $1 per month. I'd like to know more about PayPal service for this kind of cheap transactions.
How much does PayPal hold for each $1 payment ? I found this explaining the PayPal conditions for micropayment. Any feedback on this ?
Plus, how does PayPal handle currency conversion ? My service is worldwide, so I want my users to be able to buy my product not only using dollars, but euros or another currency.
Thanks
In the link you quoted the fees section is expandable and you can see the Micropayments pricing:
5% + $0.05
Signing up for it doesn't require any vetting or contract changes. Contact Customer Service and they file a request to a team that enables Micropayments. Should be done within a few days.
Currency conversion and cross-border transacitons are also in this page:
International Sales: The pricing table above applies to domestic payments in US dollars. There's an additional 2.5% charge for any currency conversion and a 1% charge to receive payments from another country.
If you decide to charge your buyers in USD only, they will be able to choose if they wish he card issuer or PayPal to convert the money. Most won't even notice the conversion took place and it will make your reconciliation much easier.
I wanna build a web store for selling people's second hand products.
A customer adds the products into a shopping cart.
He/she pays (credit card, bank account) for it and I get the money.
The seller sends the bought products to the customer.
I get send the money to the seller (and have taken a fee for it).
People tend to mention Amazon's, Google's and PayPal's payment service but recently I came across services like Chargify and Recurly.
My questions:
How do these two differ from the other three?
Which one would support the above mentioned transaction process?
How should I set up the above transaction process?
The "big 3" require an account. How do I charge with just a credit card or bank account only?
Thanks!
Thanks for thinking of Chargify.
We're not the right thing for your need... we focus on helping a business manage many things involved in recurring billing of customers.
For what you want to do, I think one of the "Big 3" is the way to go. You've got the extra "wrinkle" of this, however: you're essentially collecting money on behalf of each Seller, and each Seller may be selling very different things and will have different levels of honesty, etc.
All of my experience is with merchants that have a traditional merchant account and payment gateway, which together allow them to charge credit cards. But the banks that issue merchant accounts want to know what each merchant (each Seller) is about. I'm 99% sure the banks dislike a single merchant account being used to sell / collect credit card payments for more than one merchant.
Anyway, to the degree that it's useful, I wrote a blog post last year about merchant accounts and payment gateways. It may be helpful to you as you explore options:
https://lancewalley.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/merchant-accounts-payment-gateways/
See my answer in Online payments for a middleman.
PayPal Adaptive Payments allows you to accept guest payments, without requiring buyers to have a PayPal account.
Another thing to think about is regional availability; Amazon / Google may sound interesting, but are not very useful if you don't live in the US or UK. Whereas PayPal Adaptive Payments is available pretty much globally (with the exception of a few countries where PayPal hasn't launched yet).
Currently, I use PayPal for payment processing. Almost 90% of the items are sold for $.99 and would like to use Paypals's Micropayment account, but PayPal states "support for Micropayments to merchants for US to US, GB to GB, AU to AU, and EU to EU transactions". My company is located in the US but the customers are very global. Does this mean using Micropayment option, I can't take payment from someone who lives in Europe or outside the US? Currently I am using the regular account and I am paying $.34 for each sale, which is very unprofitable. Are there other payment processing service I can use with lower fee?
Thank you.
Unless you have insanely high volume like fast-food chains do, it is very difficult to obtain a merchant account where the transaction pricing is feasible for micro-payments. Most providers will suggest an aggregation model where you sell your content but only bill your customers periodically, i.e. bill them once a month so that several purchases are bundled together, making the transaction fees less of an impact.
Here is one provider offering such a model:
http://www.allcharge.com/services-billing-micro-payments.asp
I do not work for the above company (in fact, I work for a payments company that does not offer micropayments).
Not the answer you were hoping for, I'm sure, but hopefully it helps.
Take a look at www.carrot.org which runs a micropayment system. Customers using carrotPay load funds into an electronic purse - WebPurse - and can make payments with 2 clicks if you have a Carrot buy button installed on your site. The buy button can be set up along side other payment methods on your site. The webpurse automatically converts the currency so if your client has GBP in their purse, they will be presented with a GBP price for authorisation but the merchant receives USD if this is the currency they used to price the product. Charges work out at 6% - 10% maximum. The Webpurses can also used for some kind of loyalty schemes as they will store many different currencies, real and virtual. If you would like more information please contact andy#carrot.org
Take a look at Google's In-App Payments. The fee is a flat 5% which is great for transactions
http://code.google.com/apis/inapppayments/
I do work for Google, but I've taken a look at other similar products and can honestly say that In-App Payments is a very competitive product.
You can use Randpay - scalable micro-payment system, based on blockchain: https://medium.com/#emer.tech/randpay-6a028f16c82a
Does anyone know a way to get the currency exchange rates for paypal?
We have custom shopping cart and use Paypal (Website Payments Standard) to handle payments.
Our 'home' currency is Euro, but we would like to present our customers the option to pay in different currencies (USD, CAD, AUD and GBP).
PayPal offers the option to:
a) automatically convert our Euro quoted prices to, for example, USD upon checkout
b) checkout in USD directly
With option a):
We get paid in Euro, the customer pays for the currency exchange (good).
The customer does not know what he/she is going to be charged in USD until checkout. (bad)
With option b)
The customer pays in USD, then the currency is converted into EUR and we pay the the currency exchange.
The customer never has to worry about the different currencies (excellent)
We do not know the exchange rate PayPal is going to use so we cannot quote the correct prices to our customer (showstopper)
So my question is:
Does anybody know a way to get the PayPal exchange rates?
or
Does anybody know how to make a good estimate?
Update:
PayPal updates it's exchange rate 2 times a day. (at least, that is what they state). They use the Interbank Exchange Rate provided by ??? and add a 2.5% spread above this rate to determine their retail foreign exchange rates.
Unforunately, there the Interbank Exchange Rates vary from source to source and from minute to minute.
We have been monitoring the PayPal exchange rates and cross referenced them with the Official reference rates provides by the European Central Bank. the results vary widely, somewhere from 1 to 6 ! percent...
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_convert-currency-withdrawal is a (needs login) page on Paypal where you can perform currency conversions at Paypal's rates.
I just found this:
https://www.x.com/thread/38451 (This link is now broken)
so it look like there is something you could use
https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1400 (This link is now broken)
https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1401 (This link is now broken)
I also found this
http://apipay.net/easyapi/index.php?sid=paypal&id=nvp_adpay&ac=convertcurrency (This link is now appears to be broken also)
and there is someone that already posted a question about that
PHP example for PayPal Adaptive Payments ConvertCurrency API
Regarding getting a good estimate; PayPal says here that they base their rate on the "Interbank Exchange Rate" and that "Customers may use these rates as a reference".
However they of course go on to say that these rates are not guaranteed, and if you want the precise rate you need to see what rate they apply in the transaction.
I am not aware of any way of obtaining the precise rate programmatically.
I suppose you could make your own payment of $0.01 every day and observe the exchange rate applied - but even that assumes they only update their rate every day.
I contacted their customer service and they explained, that at least in my region, they added 3.5% over the XE.com exchange rates. I was able to hand this to my accountant and use it as evidence of a tax-deductible business expense.
Their exchange rates are ~10% off the daily spot rates in the currencies I use (THB/USD). And although I have USD bank accounts they refuse to transfer USD to my USD accounts. Not sure if that is their policy for all countries / all currencies though, but for THB/USD they are inflexible.
Another thing to be aware of when using paypal - their "seller protection" is limited depending on what you sell and through what channels. In other words, you need to do a certain amount of fraud checking yourself to avoid shipping to customers who have used stolen credit card #s.
As you say, they base the "PayPal exchange rate" on the "recent currency conversion rate". In my experience, they add 3-4%.
The only place I found to get the PayPal exchange rate is here but it needs you to be logged in.
I've created a publicly visible Google doc that lists the historical rates.
This allows you to track the PayPal exchange rates so that you know when best to withdraw or transfer your money. Please contribute to the data by adding today's rates into this form.
If you are strictly interested in conversion from and to Euro, the European Central Bank has a public (and free) xml document that is updated daily:
http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml
Parsing it is easy:
$XML=simplexml_load_file("http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml");
foreach($XML->Cube->Cube->Cube as $rates){
if($rates["currency"] == 'USD'){
$rate = ''.$rates["rate"];
// do your thing with it here
}
}
I found paypal adaptive payment service to integrate currency exchange rates on website but it is not working correctly on live account. You can go through the details from the link https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/products/adaptive-payments/
Well, the following service should be useful for the conversion: http://rate-exchange.herokuapp.com/. Our company uses this for many live projects including an Chrome extension which seems running so far.