Currency conversion rip-off

[martik777]

Item listed for 28.53 USD (37.30 CAD)  When I pay with paypal USD account it converts 37.30 CAD to 30.07USD!   Is it possible to pay in USD of 28.53 as listed?

[marnotom!]

Is your PayPal USD balance set as your "preferred" source of funds?  (Do you have funds in your PayPal USD account?)

[martik777]

My paypal is all in USD

[femmefan1946]

https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=USD&To=CAD

The Buy and Sell rates are different.

The rates change constantly-- not just daily.

The exchange rate on this site is the mid-market rate -- only used by central banks and very large corporations. Retail rates, used by your bank branch and eBay, are different again.

[pjcdn2005]

If you have US$ in your Paypal account you should be able to pay in $US.  I just tried it with your one listing that is in US$.  I put it in my cart and then clicked on checkout and  then Paypal.  That's when it gave me the option to pay in $US or $C.  I didn't go any further than that so I can't confirm it would take the US payment but it appears that it would.   Do you have your paypal account to automatically pay without having to sign in? That might be the problem?

[martik777]

I did not see the option to pay USD and I don't want to go past entering the authenticator code.  Will check out next tiem

Thanks

[marnotom!]

I'm still having trouble getting my head around some of this.

If you have C$37.30 and you're wanting to buy US dollars with it, isn't it a better deal for it to be converted to US$30.07 than to US$28.53 as you're getting more US$ for the same amount of C$?

And I'm still unclear about whether the US$ PayPal account had a balance in it.  If it didn't, then the payment would likely have been withdrawn from the buyer's funding source.  What was the funding source for your PayPal payment, @martik777?

EDIT/ADDENDUM: Or were you trying to pay for an item listed in C$ with your US$ account?

[martik777]

Item was listed in CAD (37.30) on ebay.com and also showed the USD amount of 28.53

My Canadian Paypal is all in USD so I wanted to pay 28.53 but the option was not available so it converted the CAD to 30.07USD using paypal's  rip-off exchange rate. Not a big deal for such a small amount but for a 3k transaction I would have lost about $150

[marnotom!]

I haven't done any currency conversions with PayPal lately, but in the past I found that its exchange rate was comparable to my credit union's, a shade better than my VISA issuer's, and much better than my MasterCard issuer's.

As @femmefan1946 points out, currencies have buy and sell rates.  What you see on eBay is the "mid-market" rate based on the currency's performance on currency exchanges.  In other words, it's halfway between the two rates.  It doesn't really exist as anything but a benchmark and is considered an approximation on eBay for reference only.

You might find this of interest:

https://www.tdcommercialbanking.com/rates/index.jsp