A crowd-funding campaign I backed is having a rough time with international shipping on account of current world events, and they’ve decided to eat the losses themselves, but I’d like to contribute something towards it (and in addition I was going to add something new to my pledge); but kickstarter and the pledge manager are no longer options – no more payments can be made that way.
The person in question has a PayPal account, so I thought I was going to use that, but holy cow… for me to send them US$20, PayPal tells me they’ll be charging me an additional 24% as a fee, which seems nuts.
This was for sending using the “friends and family” option (which doesn’t incur their “buyer protection” fee). The “goods and services” option does incur that fee (for the seller) and furthermore doesn’t incur any fees at all for me, and consequently my impression is that they’d be subtracting more than 24% from what the seller receives?!
I’m not ok with that. I’ll still do it if I need to, but those fees are above the threshold of my seriously wanting to know if there’s a better option out there (both for me and for them).
Does anyone know of a better option? Something which might be worth the hassle of getting set up to use?
I don’t have anything helpful.
Do they maybe have a Patreon? I think Patreon takes less than 25%
In Germany we have a paypal alternative called WERO offered by a number of banks cooperating. Since most of my friends now have it we can use it privately. Since it is directly hosted from the banks it falls under all the data protection laws that banks fall under which is really nice.
I was under the impression that the buyer protection fee is quite small for the seller (I think it’s only 3%) but maybe I’ve been misled about that!
I might be completely wrong about this but worth asking them whether that’s the case?
Otherwise something like Ko fi might work but requires them to set it up. I’ve never heard of the 24% extra from PayPal and I I’ve used friends and family in the past, that seems ridiculous!
Patreon used to have quite reasonable fees and then over time have increased them, particularly for anyone who starts a new patreon as opposed to someone who started it before the fee increases. I think it’s probably less than 25% but I’m not sure it’s still significantly less unless the creator’s patreon is quite old!
Well I ended up using Paypal, and I chose the “goods and services” option – partly just to find out what the fees ended up being, because I couldn’t tell up-front.
The result was that Paypal appears to seriously gouge people who use the “friends and family” option. Or they were for the transaction I was looking at, at least. The stated fee for doing it that way was more than 5x what my recipient informed me had been deducted for “goods and services”.
The other helpful tip I found along the way was that Paypal chooses very unfavourable (for you; very favourable for them!) exchange rates, and you’ll quite likely pay a little less if you select the option to have your bank do the conversion. (You won’t know until later though, so probably check to see if your bank advertises the exchange rates.)
If you are traveling and they “offer” to have you pay in your own currency: decline and pay in the local currency. Your bank usually has more favorable exchange rates.
I had a place in London do this to me a couple years ago, after I’d told them no. The receipt they gave me had no indication that was what they’d done, I didn’t see it until I got the statement from my bank. If I remember right, the extra they charged me was about $15 on 200 quid, based on the exchange rate on other transactions.