We had an interesting question from a Tamebay reader concerning using one of the many currency arbitrage services to repatriate Euro funds from Amazon EU sales back to the UK in Sterling.
The premise of these services is that Amazon will apply their own exchange rate but third party companies can offer more attractive rates. You use a virtual Euro bank account provided by the third party and they then send the funds in British pounds back to your bank account with perhaps as much as a 2% advantage over using Amazon’s own rates.
Amazon however in general insist that the account holder details in Seller Central need to be in the name of our your company. To use a third party service provider you’d need to put their bank details in Seller Central and the name of the account would be in their name.
This is the first time we’ve heard of such an issue, but if you have any problem getting Amazon to accept your third party currency partner’s bank account accepted on Amazon, speak to the provider and they should be able to assist.
2 Responses
we have used a few different providers over the last couple of years. However, a couple of months ago, we were looking to use Western Union and had everything setup. We added the account details then had the review come up and told we had to prove the account was ours. Western Union confirmed they already had a couple of hundred users using their system to transfer money from Amazon to them. Unfortunately in our case, it did not work. Not sure why this time it did not work even when we had used other providers in the past. My argument to Amazon was it is our money and we would like to do with it what we want, but I guess its never your money when it’s through Amazon and it probably is to help with fraud.