As part of the Tamebay service we like to share with readers some of the things that could be considered ‘trade secrets’. Little tricks and services that plenty of people don’t know and which the marketplaces and others might not necessarily crow about. One of those things is the PayPal Merchant Rate.
The reason for making this post follows from a recent conversation with an eBay seller who didn’t know about the PayPal Merchant Rate. He subsequently reported back to tell me that he’d made the calculations and looked at his recent selling and discovered that he had overpaid on PayPal fees to the tune of £1500 in the past year. He was annoyed at that but glad he was now in the know.
PayPal Merchant Rate
You need to opt in to get preferential rates from PayPal (find out more here) and the fees you pay depend on the volumes of payments you’re taking. If you take over £55k a month, you also need to get in touch and have a conversation (it would be interesting to know if PayPal ever proactively contacts sellers).
Here is a grab of the slightly hard to find offerings:
PayPal Micropayments
And don’t forget the fees for Micropayments too: if you take a lot of small value transactions you need to get involved and get preferential rates. As PayPal says: “Whether you’re selling small items on eBay or digital goods on your own website, our special rates for low value transactions will help you make more out of every sale.” You can find the relevant page on micropayments here.
Of course, we wish that Paypal would tell sellers about these useful and money saving schemes with greater enthusiasm and openness but they don’t seem to. That’s why we like to mention them from time to time.
3 Responses
I was reviewing selling costs last week to make sure my home made ebay calculator is up to speed, found my calculations were a bit out so I ended up ringing Paypal to confirm our rates as it is not shown on our account details, turns out we are currently charged 1.4%+20p for what they call wallet payments (ebay and paypal to paypal) but charged 1.9%+20p for over the phone virtual terminal sales. So can be different selling costs depending on how the item is purchased.
Holy Smoke what a scoop just applied and accepted, over the last 12 months I could have saved 3.3k !!! thanks for the heads up Tamebay.
Thanks Tamebay, I had totally missed doing that after recvently switching Paypal accounts, thankfully it has not been for long but it really would help if big businesses Like Paypal would be a little more “honest” with customers.