Ok, I’m hella pissed right now. I’m from Germany and just bought a card from Great Britain. They use GBP, Germany uses Euro. So far so good. Now, when you attempt to buy something from another country, ebay shows you what the price of the item would be in your currency in the window right before you confirm your purchase. So I buy the card via paypal. The card shows up in my ‘bought items’ list on ebay for the price I expected to pay. I log in on paypal to check the transfer, and look at that, the cost for the card as shown on paypal is suddenly a whopping 100€ more than the price shown on ebay. Why? Because ebay uses the currently valid exchange rate (right now 1:0.84 according to xe.com) to calculate the estimated price in €, while paypal for some goddamn reason just used an exchange rate of 1:0.89. In essence, I was cheated into spending 100€ I wasn’t ready to spend.
If you want to avoid this fuckery for yourself, before making a purchase, login to your paypal account, go to your wallet page, then click on “currency calculator” to see what currency rate paypal currently uses. And to top it off, even their shitty currency calculator just showed me the wrong exchange rate (1:0.86 instead of the 1:0.89 they used on me).
Yes, always buy in the seller’s currency of choice, do not use PP conversion, and use a credit card with no exchange rate fees.
when you pay in a foreign currency through paypal, you have the option of using the exchange rate of paypal or the exchange rate of your credit card issuer, always take the one of your credit card issuer.
Good to know…
Yes its awful, the highest they took from me was 8-9% for the conversion, it is completely insane. Average seems to be ~5%
You can also use services like transferwise.com/
With this service you pay even less fees most likely.
does it work to convert money from paypal?
With this service, you could send your preferred currency to it (bank transfer), convert it and then deposit the converted currency in paypal (bank transfer to paypal or their top up service).