What is the PayPal Business Payment Fee ?

[RWAP]

If anyone wades down through the Legal agreement, you will see at the very end, a section entited:

"PayPal Business Payment Fee"

Under this, PayPal may apply a £2 fee to each transaction and it states that "The PayPal Business Payment fee is paid by the recipient, unless it is disclosed to the sender before payment is sent that the sender must pay this fee."

Oddly no-one at PayPal has been able to clarify the circumstances under which this £2 fee is levied, and there is no mention of it on their fees pages, so I wonder how the recipient is supposed to identify this and disclose it to the sender if they want the sender to pay this fee....

I know it appears to have been applied to a friend's account (he is in Germany and was paid by someone who uses a UK shipping address, but upon investigation, has a PayPal account in South Africa).

Does anyone have any ideas of when and why this fee is applied, and how to identify transactions where the fee will be added by PayPal ??

Maybe it is just another example of PayPal being a law unto themselves and just applying an extra fee willy-nilly....

[kernowlass]

@RWAP

Its not an extra fee, its a fee instead of the % fee.

If a business is happy to accept bank transfer ie echeques OR funds from a buyers paypal balance only and want to refuse all card payments they can opt to accept this way of paying INSTEAD of the % fee payments. Then they just pay a flat fee payment per transaction.

[RWAP]

That's interesting - so how come recipients in the USA get away with just a 50 cent fee !!

I can't see how you would ask to be charged using the flat fee method....  Is there a link?

[PayPal_david]

Hi there RWAP,

Thanks for reaching out.

The fee rates may vary depending on the country, type of payment, your current fee rate and if the payment is a cross border payment.

You can find more information on how our fee structure works by clicking the Fees icon at the bottom of any PayPal webpage.

David.