Last month however, Paypal massively increased the fee for sending Mass Pay, to 2% of the value of the payment, up to a max of $45 per recipient. This means that when we now pay out royalties to 150 composers, it costs us over $1,000 in Paypal FEE for one Mass Pay. This represents a price increase overnight over several hundred percent!
The Mass Pay function is a fully automated operation that nobody in Paypal has to lift a finger to make happen. As a Paypal user we do the whole operation ourselves, using our Paypal account screen. It seems excessive to me, for Paypal to charge over $1,000 in fee for one automated process.
Looks like Paypal are starting to realize some of the monopoly they have on this market and is starting to maximize profit by blackmail type fees. :-(
Ironically, it's still slightly cheaper than sending 150 international bank wire transfers, and of course, the Paypal Mass Pay is a lot less work.
We have communicated this with our composers and they have kindly agreed to share the new 2% Paypal fee with us, so we are now paying 1% and the composers the other 1%, and I guess we can just about live with that.
Check out Dwolla. As I understand it, they charge 25 cents per transaction, except for transactions of $10 or less, which are free. At the current time, Dwolla is US-only.
ReplyDeletePayoneer is the way to go.
ReplyDeleteIf they keep this up, they may find that they no longer have the monopoly, people will turn to alternatives!
ReplyDeleteI've been turned on to wepay recently www.wepay.com - however also US only. Paypal still has the monopoly on worldwide transfers =(.
In this matter, a 2% increase means huge loss profit. I was disappointed too with paypal but I switched to epos software for fees processing.
ReplyDelete