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| Image: Clare Bloomfield / FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
I was wondering what to blog about today and something came up. It’s nothing to be excited about but I’d like to write about it nonetheless. I got charged about P800 (around $19) in PayPal!
I’m no newbie when it comes to payment transactions in PayPal. I’ve been using it for almost a year now. I know there are fees for certain services but never for personal use and to make purchases. What I was doing earlier was personal anyway and I certainly know how to send personal fees. I was sending an amount to my other account so I can withdraw funds after. In PayPal, only one bank account can be associated to an email so I had two email addresses for two bank accounts. No! I don’t have that much money. I’m just a regular freelancer like many are. J
So I signed off the first email and logon to the second one. To my surprise, almost Php 700 was missing. I refreshed the page a lot of times to see the transaction details but the only thing I saw was the fact that money was indeed sent but there was no indication about what happened to what was missing. I contacted support for answers.
At that time, I wasn’t sleepy, tired, or hungry. It’s just one of those days when you’re overly sure that something went wrong. I thought I followed the usual process right, until I checked the other account and saw that the full amount was not received by the second account. I never would have known until PayPal replied to my email a few hours after. There was no invoice about any fees so I wasn’t 100% convinced though. So I tried sending money again to and from two accounts and found out there was another fee again, this time about Php 100 as I just tested a smaller amount of funds.
Send Payment in PayPal
So what went wrong? It was about two buttons when you click on ‘send payment’. You have the option to use Online Purchases or Personal Payments. The latter does not have associated fees except for a few exceptions. Under the former, you can choose goods or services and I’ve been using this payment flow since a writer mentioned of a fee even for personal payments. That’s the exception for personal payments, he’s from overseas.
But this is obviously a local goods or services purchase. And yet I was billed a fee. That it may also imply that all other writers and all the payments I’ve sent in the past are charged. None of them complained though, probably because it’s not much (a few cents each time maybe). I never would have noticed it myself, had it not been almost Php 700. Make that Php 800 now, after the fee for the second try. I still tried it a third time but this time using the Personal Payments flow. There were no more fees afterwards.
So for everyone who is using PayPal for payment transactions, know that there is a fee when using the online purchases (or at least that payment flow). Personal payments on the other hand have none (at least within the same country).
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