Conversion rates when buying through PayPal

Hi,

I made a purchase for an Item sold in France (EUR) using my Revolut Card which has both a GBP and EUR associated accounts and which I had linked to PayPal.

I was surprised to find that PayPal did not use the EUR account to pay for the item, but charged me in GBP (with their own conversion rates). So for a 2.3K EUR purchase I have been debited 2.4K EUR.

Hey @stefanoric :slight_smile:

When paying with PayPal, it will offer you to charge your card in GBP doing a bad FX and forcing :r: to do a good FX back to EUR. You can manually override it if you pay close attention or disable it for future transactions from your account or getting in touch with PayPal’s customer support :wink:

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Thanks, I have contacted PayPal about this.

I don’t remember seeing any option to change the currency but I might have missed.

Interesting bit, in which country is your Paypal account registered?

On the blog there are good posts explaining dynamic currence conversion. Which is what happened to you.

Hi, it’s registered in the UK.

Alright, thanks, I was hoping for something non-British.

Because in this case we cant tell whether Paypal automatically charges one in the default currency of his account or his card.

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@henrikbjorn, which blog? Revolut or Paypal?

Revolut blog. They have a lot of informational posts about how banking works on the inside

Hey @stefanoric :slight_smile:

It looks like this:

[Image Source: @Nada_Surf at StackExchange.com]

I think the UI is a bit different now, they seem to have overhauled it a bit.

Yes, @stefanoric, that screenshot is almost 5 years old, but the option is still displayed mostly the same way in the all-new UI (similar text, next to the payment method) :wink:

Hi there. For future transactions, you can go on the Payments section on PayPal and then select “Pre-Approved Payments” and then select “Funding Sources” and then click on “Conversion Options” next to your card. This will give you the option to select the to select “Bill me in the currency listed on the seller’s invoice”. Then click submit and save. This is not a guaranteed fix but it should prevent PayPal from applying their conversion again.

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What is strange here is that the Revolut Card is associated with 2 currencies, one of which is the same as the seller currencies, and they have decided to charge me in GBP.

Please note that from BIN (see: https://www.bincodes.com/) we can check where the card was issued. But unfortunately there is not possible to check card’s currency. So you’re card will be always recognised as a mono currency (GBP in your case) and it doesn’t matter how many currencies are connected to this particular card.

@redi I have already used this card online to pay for EUR items (e.g. on my last vacation in Portugal) and I have NOT been charged in GBP but directly in EUR. This must be something peculiar to PayPal.

In case of PayPal- 100% agree

See this solution:

FYI AirBNB, GetYourGuide etc. all do the same thing. As they make money on doing Dynamic Currency Conversion.

Here is wikipedia article about it:

To quickly get to to the well-hidden PayPal conversion options :

https://www.paypal.com/il/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_profile-merchant-pull-funding&buyer_hub