I've been taking a look recently at making payments to people. The default choice for everyone seems to be PayPal, but lots of folks have a variety of issues with PayPal, from policies to fees to money handling issues. Most alternatives, like ProPay, Moneybookers, and Paymate seem to be geared far more towards online merchants than peer payments.

I thought I'd found a solution at Obopay, which basically just charges 25¢ to the payer for each transaction. This sounds like a great plan. Until I found out about their limits. I need to repay Dignan for buying a Mac Mini for me: $500. But Obopay won't let me send more than $75 a day, $100 in 3 days, and $150 a week. So it would take me a month to repay him this way, not to mention that it will cost me $1.75 instead of 25&cent, due to being required to make multiple payments. Supposedly, as one uses the service, the limits will increase, but that doesn't help me now. I even called their customer support, who were friendly, but they said they couldn't/wouldn't increase the limit.

Bruno had mentioned that Canadians can do payments via email by using a feature of their ATM system broker.

I'm curious as to how people do this. I'm actively interested in how to do it in the US, as I have a payment I need to make, and it's starting to look like the best way is to just send him a check in the mail. But it's the 21st century now. There should be a better way. I'm also curious as to how people around the world do this.

Thoughts?

Can't you do a simple bank transfer as you know the guy you are transferring to?

Here in the UK that is quick and free, just a call to your bank with the other guys details will do it over here.

Cheers

Cris.

Nope. Would take a good number of business days and costs in the neighborhood of $10-$20.

In the UK it is typically quick and easy to use online banking to transfer money to people. As long as both your banks support the new faster payments system then the money transfers the same day. The service is typically free. If one of the banks doesn't support the faster payments system then it take 3-4 days to transfer, but again it is normally free.

However that does involve the payer having the payee's bank account number and sort code. Which I guess opens you up to potential identity theft issues. Not too much of a problem where it is someone you know and trust.

ARGH!

I just got off the phone with Paypal. To further clarify: I didn't want to use Paypal, because several months ago I'd upgraded it to a business account in order to accept payments through an invoicing service I was using. I've since stopped using that service, and now I'm stuck with a Paypal account where EVERY transaction, in or out, gets charged with a fee.

So just now I called up Paypal's "customer service." I waded through one of the most unintelligent automated systems I've used (it didn't understand a single word I said), and talked to someone who I could barely understand myself. I asked him to downgrade my account. In a retention effort, he explained the downsides to a personal account vs a business account. Here is how I understand it:

- there are no accounts on Paypal (personal, "premium," or business) that can receive any amount of money for free. Isn't that different than how it used to be? I've never been a big ebay seller, so I'm not too familiar.
- the personal account has a limit to 5 receipts a year, and $500 in a month (which makes it useless for Bitt and I, since he needs to send money for shipping too).
- the premiere account lifts that restriction, but charges a fee for payments, like the business account. I can't really see what the difference between the premiere and business accounts are.

So, unless Bitt wants to add another $15+ to this, we'll have to find another way.

That's unbelievable about Obopay, Bitt. I don't know how they'll make money with those restrictions.

I don't know if it is the same in the US, but if you select "personal payment" on a transaction between two personal UK PalPay accounts then neither party is charged. I don't know what restrictions it has on amounts etc though.

A personal PayPal account used to serve some purpose. Now they're useless unless you want to open a new one every few weeks for small payments - going through the hassle of verifying them as you go and risk being banned/limited because you're opening more than one.

A premier account is used for personal sales and doesn't have the limitations that make the Personal account totally useless. The rates are higher and the limits are lower than a Business account however. That is to say, a Business account will start you at the same rate, but you can get a lower rate by increasing volume.

Business accounts also allow you to use IPN (instant payment notification) to automate a shopping cart as well as move to Web Payments Pro which allows you to use your web site's interface instead of moving people over to the PayPal page to make payments.

There are no fees to send money for the Premier and Business accounts. Only to receive.

PayPal is a payment gateway and processor, intended primarily for business. It is not a generalized way of moving money around.

I'm sure that in the US, like everywhere else in the world, someone can directly deposit money into your bank account if they go to a branch of your bank with your name, branch number (routing code in US) and account number. This is not the same thing as a wire/TT transfer. The payer would show up with cash to a branch of the payee's bank and make a deposit just as if it were the payee doing it.

There's also a postal money order which last I checked was still somewhat cheap in the US. Benefit versus a personal cheque is that it' as good as cash and shouldn't incur any hold period while waiting for the funds to clear.

Personal banking in North America is a good 15 years behind most of Europe and it doesn't look like that situation is improving any time soon. Most of the banks in Canada ad the US spend their time figuring out how to apply ever greater service fees without actually offering any new services.

Which belies the name PayPal. I guess the point is that it's changed since it started.


Now, that's true. I could do that.


IIRC, there has been a good amount of money order forging, and those benefits no longer exist. Regardless, an extra day or two is irrelevant. I want to be able to send it electronically, in a reasonable amount of time, and for low cost.


Yeah, the two things that most of the Europeans I've spent any time with while they were in the US notice the most is the antiquarian banking and the number of passenger trucks on the road.


Tell me about it. That's why I left my last bank (Wachovia) after 15 years. For example, in order to do a wire transfer with them, I had to go to the branch, fill out paperwork, and it cost something like $40. (To be fair, Wachovia went away in all but name after First Union bought — uh, I mean "merged" with — them.)

That's not quite true:


So as long as the sender clicks "Cash Advance" (and, maybe, "Services/Other" — it would be nice if their documentation's terms matched their application's) on the "Send Money" page, a personal account can apparently receive an unlimited amount of money. Of course, if the backing funds are a credit card instead of a bank account, you get the credit card's higher cash advance interest rates. (Not a problem for our current issue.)

And the 5-a-year thing is only for accepting credit card payments, and, even then, I think that doesn't apply when the sender is a PayPal member who happens to back his account with a credit card.

You see, that's what I thought it was, and I asked the person on the phone if this was the case, and he said no. I specifically asked about Paypal-to-Paypal with both accounts linked to bank accounts, and he said that a fee was applied to those transactions. I guess that was more retention BS.

It's possible that if we were able to communicate better, I would have heard something different, but I was pretty clear on my end and I was able to understand him saying I was incorrect.

So I guess we could try Paypal then. I'll need to call them again tomorrow, though, to switch my account. I got so frustrated with them that I told him to forget about it (it was a hassle getting him to do what I wanted anyway) and I hung up.

You could just create a new PayPal personal account. That way you can continue to accept credit card payments with lower(ish) rates, and also accept cashmoney for free.

You need to use two different bank accounts if you plan to have two PayPal accounts. And you are limited to 1 of each type, so don't ever tell PayPal if you in fact have more than one.

Yeah. Most people have both a checking and a savings account, I figure.

And it's probably not a great idea to tell paypal about either of them. I've got an old checking account that I keep around pretty much only for paypal.

I just use two different credit-cards with paypal. One for the personal account, and one for the extra-fees account.

-ml

You can call PayPal and ask them to change your business account to a personal account. I've done it before.

EDIT: I see you've tried that. Just be firm with them because they may try to talk you out of it. I'm pretty sure they will switch it because they've done it for me.

If that doesn't work then I'd just mail a check.

Holy thread bump batman! But at least it is on-topic.

So I need a means to receive a once off payment from the EU of a few grand, but my bank does not have a SWIFT code, and therefore cannot do so, nor can they cash a foreign check, and the senders bank doesn't do foreign bank orders (maybe they went away with the arrival of the Euro).

Any suggestions?

Post offices do money orders too.

This is a constant problem that really needs to go away. I have a TD Bank account open with minimum balance just for this purpose. Annoyingly, they take $15 on top of the normal wire fee. By the time the money hits my account, I'm usually missing $40 from the transferred amount.

If you want a Simple bank account, I have invites and they accept incoming international wires. However, it has to go through an intermediary bank (Wells Fargo) which some consumer bank accounts overseas might not allow without an actual trip to the bank. The fee for an incoming wire is $0 with Simple.

Your other options are Paypal, Western Union, Moneygram, and maybe Xoom. Last time I looked at Xoom, it was only for transfers originating in the US.

Probably should have mentioned the originating country is Ireland, as this can differ from EU country to EU country. It would appear that the post offices (thanks Mark) in Ireland provide Western Union (thanks Rob) money transfer services, so that maybe the way for me to go.

For now this is a once of thing, but in the future it may be a regular thing, and would need to be super simple, as in a few web clicks on their end, which likely means another account on my end, like Rob, but preferable with minimal fees, as the regular amounts would not be big money. Hmmm....maybe I need a cheap account in Ireland...

Thanks!

Google has now rolled out a send money feature in Gmail. Showed up for me today. Fees appear to be modest.

So the transfer was done via Western Union, but took three attempts to pickup. RiteAid won't receive any transfers over $1k, Hannafords Supermarket is missing some software update as their computers were asking question but not providing a box to input the answer (I blame WU for this) WU was not able to provide any assistance via phone. Finally last night Stop & Shop was able to accept the transaction, and issued a money order for amount, which I've deposited at my bank.

I need to find out how much this cost on the other side with WU fees, it looks like about 4%, which I suppose is not dreadful, but for smaller amounts it is closer to 10% - which is way too much.

@DWallach "This feature will be rolling out to Gmail users ages 18+ in the U.S." This will be useful for within US transfers, though I've been using Amazon GC for that - no fees there