Foreign currency purchase on ebay: how do I prevent Paypal converting the payment into £GBP?

[LondonJon]

I am buying a product in EUR. My credit card's conversion rate is 1.13 EUR/£. However Paypal is automatically converting to £ using their own inferior rate of 1.08, adding about 5% to the cost of my purchase. I can't find an option to change this this so that I check out in the currency of the lisiting, i.e. EUR.

[PayPal_Rachael]

Hi LondonJon,

Welcome to the community forum and thanks for posting.

If you are using a card for your payment rather than a bank account you can choose that your card issuer do this conversion. This is how:

1. Click the drop-down arrow beside PayPal.
2. Click the currency exchange figures link next to “Exchange rate”.
3. Click View conversion rate options in the pop-up window.
4. Select between “PayPal currency conversion rate” and “Your card issuer’s rate”.
5. Click Agree.

If you are buying on eBay or on some other sites they will sometimes convert the payment before it gets to us so make sure you are looking out for that also.

I hope this helps.

Rachael

[john_dcuk]

Rachaels instructions did not initially work for me until I found a workaround which I'll share.

The pop-up window in step (3) of those instructions did not contain the  View conversion rate options link even when the payment option was a credit card which supported that (bank accounts don't).

What I found was that if the first payment option in the list (the preferred option) was a bank account then even after changing the payment option to a credit card and clicking the corresponding exchange rate the options link was just not there in the popup.  I logged onto paypal and changed my preferred payment option for online purchases to a credit card and started the ebay checkout procedure again.  The View conversion rate options then became available to me as per the instructions.