#general-chat
Thread
Really not sure where to put this. I posted this a few months ago on the tech talk thread, however only had a couple of replies suggesting to use a third party payment gateway called Nuvei.
I have been deep diving into fees related to a transaction through Shopify and feel like many including myself would be or are shocked at the costs related to this process.
Here is one simple transaction from the other day (NB: I am an Australian business however sell to the USA).
Sale Price: $151 USD
PayPal Fee $5.74 USD ($8.81 AUD)
Net Total: $145.26 USD
Paypal Conv to AUD: $213.99 ($220.49 on Transfer Wise after fees. Image shows spot rate).
So essentially this single transaction has cost:
$8.81 AUD (Paypal Fee)
$6.50 (Exchange Rate difference)
So in total this transaction cost $15.31 AUD or 6.61% of the original transaction.
This obviously doesn’t take into consideration all of the other costs associated with making the sale.
Also if we are to leave the currency in USD, then we avoid the conversion rate costs, and use Transfer wise to make hold funds and make payments in the foreign currencies.
This is obviously barely touching the surface, so I would love to know if anyone know someone that specialises in this space and can consult and save a few $$.
Ha! I was also shocked when I found out about it. I'm using HK PayPal account, selling in the US, UK, EU, etc as well.
6%+ was the figure that I calculated 2 years ago.
The only workaround is to try to pay your bills with PayPal, instead of defaulting to withdraw in your local currency.
E.g. if you have USD in your PayPal account, and if you use your USD to pay FB ads, you can save on that exchange rate fee that you would need to pay if you pull the USD out into AUD.
We then pay the fee for the remaining money we pull out of PayPal, which is still a lot unfortunately.
The only full solution is to use a local US PayPal account to receive US customer's payments. But that would require SSN or ITIN, and a few complicated steps for foreigners.