PayPal add ability to auto withdraw funds daily

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PayPal have added a new Settlement Withdrawal service, which enables you to automatically transfer money from your PayPal account to your bank account at the end of each day. The feature can be accessed by clicking the “Withdraw” tab at the top of the PayPal page and the link is underneath the manual withdrawal methods.

There are a couple of things to consider before enabling this though. Firstly make sure you click to enable the Electronic funds transfer (2-3 days) and not the faster method (1-2 days). If you inadvertently select the faster withdrawals then you’ll pay £5 per day for the privilege. You should also be aware that there is a minimum withdrawal of £6.00 at any one time from your PayPal account.

The second thing to be aware of is that fully emptying your PayPal account could have undesirable consequences. For instance if you have a chargeback or disputed payment the funds will be put on hold automatically making you overdrawn on your PayPal account. If you pay your eBay fees from PayPal or have any other regular recurring payments you can never ensure that the funds will be available when they’re needed.

Finally I have come across sellers in the past who withdrew daily and emptied their PayPal account who were then had their account restricted. Each time they made a withdrawal it was delayed for 72 hours for no apparent reason. The best explanation is that it’s to cover PayPal in the event of chargebacks or claims, and as soon as they started leaving a balance in their PayPal account the delay on withdrawals disappeared.

Although automatically sweeping your PayPal account and withdrawing the funds on a daily basis might seem like a good idea, think carefully before enabling it and if it really is the best course of action for you.

15 Responses

  1. Excellent development.

    We have to schedule a manual task to do this at the moment, and this is a good step forward. I’m impressed that payments seem to have been transferring to our bank account quicker more recently as well. Typically 2-3 working days on the standard service.

    Put live – will note any problems!

  2. It’s a shame users can’t define a specific amount to ensure some money is left, but also getting the benefits of regular transfers without logging in every day to transfer manually.

    I would use it if I could transfer an average of about half each day’s take (reviewed regularly)

  3. Yes, I agree with others, I like to leave a balance in there ‘just in case’, so wouldn’t want to clear the account completely each day.

    I’ve noticed that withdrawals have been hitting the account a lot quicker recently too 🙂

  4. Waste of time if you ask me, given eBay’s history of monumental ‘new feature’ cock ups I would log in anyway just to make sure it had worked which defeats the whole object and would take the same time as withdrawing it manually.

  5. We’ve been using the settlement feature for months.

    1. It runs a day behind & only takes the what has been received that day, not the total balance.

    2. If you manually withdrawn, you’ll get a ‘Your Settlement Withdrawal has not been deposited’ email.

    3. Make sure that a Direct Debit is active on Paypal for eBay fee’s & a card for chargebacks/refunds

  6. Whirly has hit the nail on the head. Any seller with more than two functioning brain cells will log in to check.

    I realize sellers on eBay are stuck with PayPal, however for the liberated, Google Checkout does the withdrawal sweep automatically.

    Two things to understand about GC:

    “New to GC” merchants will now have funds held longer than usual until they have established a track record on GC. I have been unable to find the information to verify this but have been told the ‘trial period’ is 60 days.

    While the sweep is automatic, at the other end you must capture the authorized funds manually AND ship within 24 hours of capture.

  7. There is another point. I regularly buy on ebay. So I leave a reasonable amount on Paypal to cover anything that I might buy. Currently on Bidding and Watching I have several hundred pounds of items although I am probably only serious about say £50. So for me it makes sense to leave about £100 on Paypal. Also my Sales are not regular. One day can be nil the next day significant so it makes a lot of sense for me to daily check my Paypal Account and if I am looking anyway I might as well do the transfers manually if and when I want to. But it is a useful additional facility.

  8. I suppose it comes down to how well your business is financed.
    For us, we usually clear our PP accounts 1-2 times a month.

  9. Well we set this up on Sunday after reading this article here and I’m afraid I can’t figure out what is going on at all.

    It’s making some withdrawals at about 8.30 pm, but it’s not clearing the account and I can’t really tell how it is picking the number to withdraw. I haven’t yet been able to monitor how quickly the amounts arrive in our bank account.

    I’ll leave it live for a few more days to see if I can see what is happening.

    @Gerry007 — I think we’re reasonably well financed, but even so I’m not going to leave £100k in Paypal for no good reason: it all adds up.

  10. Re 10. Every time I log onto Paypal there is a number of accounts. If every account has at least some money in it there must be several £billion sitting in those accounts. I wonder what the average is of money in the accounts? Obviously many are small buyers possibly a few £’s(in whatever currency) but some are Traders and some like David Brackin could be talking in terms of £100K. So the average across the board must be say £1K multiply that by the number of accounts next time you log on and the numbers are very interesting.

  11. Reporting back on this tool. This has been live on our account for about a week now.

    Payments appear to sweep out some of the available funds and at around 8.30pm. The banking cut-off is around 5pm, this means that transfers arrive with in our bank a day later.

    For example: manually on the preceding Monday we swept the account and this was deposited on Wednesday. Under automation, half the balance was swept on Monday evening, and the remainder Tues evening, arriving in our bank on Thurs and Friday.

    The anomaly is that last night the sweep was more complete and later. At midnight it took almost the entire balance. Perhaps this is a weekly catch-up sweep?

    * * *

    CONCLUSION

    The tool is under-documented so it’s hard to tell what exactly is going on. It makes a partial account sweep just after the banking cut-off with the result that funds are delayed by 1 – 1.5 days.

    In any business you should be managing your working capital, and we manage ours closely enough that I’m grumpy about giving up 1-2 days sales. And although the cost of this is less than £1k a year, that’s a much better Christmas party.

    For this reason, we’re switching the sweep off and going back to a manual withdrawal.

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