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Comment by blackhaz | Hacker News Reader

This ain't as bad as international PayPal... We (EU company) have clients paying from abroad via PayPal. I can't figure out what to do with this. We're being hit with 4.7% PayPal international fee, then ~ 3.75% fee to convert USD to our local currency to withdraw to our bank account. (PayPal won't let us withdraw USD.) Then another 2-3% to convert it back to USD in our bank to pay our supplier in USD. Imagine the total.

And the number of our PayPal-paying customers keeps growing. For some mysterious reasons it is convenient for people in very remote parts of the world to use PayPal. Direct credit card payment gateway and wire transfers are significantly more difficult for them.

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In the UK at least, you can get Paypal to add a US domiciled bank account (on ACH) and pay out that way to avoid this problem; we had to go via support to get that setup. We already had a US bank account (with HSBC) to avoid Stripe's forex charges but it was complicated to setup. A decent alternative is Wise's option; although HSBC have something called HSBC Global Wallet now which would have simplified things a lot.

I think the crux of it is that in many places in the world, credit cards are seen less like "temporary float" (like they are in the US) and more like "you pay for everything with a short term loan"?

So CCs are a lot less common. Bank cards (debit) are a lot more common. But (and feel free to correct me on this) I think their fraud handling story is still not as good as the story on credit cards.

So PayPal is seen as not-debt and also provides more fraud protection. And somehow despite their absurdly bad rap elsewhere, people look favorably upon the PayPal brand. And so here we are.

Have you thought about charging customers in Euro? Anytime I (an EU citizen) buy something from a US company, I'm charged in USD and have to cover the conversion fee. So why not do the same?

The point is, we're in the Czech Republic, so charging in Crowns is not an option. And we wouldn't be able to get Euro out of PayPal anyways, only Crowns.

What about opening a Wise account and transferring from Paypal to there?

Paypal will not let you add Wise online (at least in my case - Canada), but I called and talked to an agent and they were able to add Wise as a bank.

Paypal won't allow you to add account in different currency than main currency of country you are based at. So if you are based in Switzerland they allow you to use Swiss franc account only. And they will insist on them making the conversion - they won't pay out USD or EUR.

I do not like paypal(very shady business) but still use it as a proxy - I do not trust my CC data to some small merchant on the internet. PayPal just books directly from my bank account. I am not sure, however, if it adds some security.

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