paypal scams?

[JohnYayas]

True....but they require costs for administration, personal ect.
I feel paypal runs itself. The boss can just lay on a beach seeing the cash flow in.
Ofcource they have some personal, but i think not as much as the smallest bank in europe? (normal bank)
And all calculations, conversions, transaction, are all done by the server....

You feel PayPal runs itself? I feel you are very naive.

[mophead]

It could always be worse........

[gottaluvlasers]

BORQUEENX-

It is a little tricky. I probably wont explain it properly but here goes:

What the conversion rates displayed on places like yahoo finance, X-rate, google finance, almost all (if not *ALL*) the "conversion calculators" *including Paypal* show you the rate for is what the conversion rate is for what the currency is currently trading for on the market. In other words, what the *BANKS* are charging each other for transfering and purchasing each others money in the millions upon billions of dollars transfers.

When you and i purchase and/or sell (converts) our measly $200 or $500 or $20- the conversion rate is always much higher. Sometimes as much as 1/2 point (in the height of the financial crisis i think it was as much as 1 full point!)

This was a rude awakening for me also when i began selling KVANT. lol.

I had a customer order about $20,000 worth of lasers (literally) i quoted him out the price as based on the conversion rate that yahoo finance (or google finance or one of those calculators) gave me. At the time i think it gave me something like 1.3% Well, when i went to pay my bank wire the transfer rate was actually about 1.6% (or something close to these numbers. i dont remember the exact numbers) i ended up having to *PAY* based on erroneous conversion rates.

point being-

as much as i hate paypal, this isnt a scam. its the confusing world of international business. paypal is a multi billion dollar bank. simple as that. for them to deal with such a little buy/sell transfer of currency, it is viewed as almost an inconvenience and we are charged more.

Hope that helped a little.

-Marc

[gashead]

And all calculations, conversions, transaction, are all done by the server....

I've actually been inside one of the locations (they have several global DR and ops facilities) Paypal colo's it's machines, and in the case it's plural.. ie: servers.

These guys have a cage (as it's known in the industry) about twice the size of my house, and inside it has around about 300 machines racked in rows of racks.

Also inside are routers and switches, and the various spoils of being a Internet based business.

What I'm trying to say, is they have overheads.. I'm sure they are very profitable but when you price up their expenses to run the business. (servers, connectivity, physical location, mutiple pops, etc)

Also, paypal do have staff - not frontline customer facing like your highstreet bank - but they do have customer service reps, sales reps, etc, Techies like me, these people don't do it for the love of it.. they want paying!

It's just not cheap to run a funds transfer business.

I understand your frustration at the fees you were charged, but it's on par with most international transactions. (my bank will charge me 10 pounds to send money to a foreign bank account)

Still, my only regret is I didn't think of it!

Chur,

Nige.

[borgqueenx]

Thanks for the explanation.
But then it should say it does have admin. Or server costs: instead of just saying:
Xxx euro is xxx dollar...

[JohnYayas]

Thanks for the explanation.
But then it should say it does have admin. Or server costs: instead of just saying:
Xxx euro is xxx dollar...

You could argue that a candy bar machine should say the same thing since I can go to the grocery store and buy it a lot cheaper. Same goes for a beer at a bar. But, when I get my beer at the local pub and it costs $4.00 I don't go on the internet and say that bars are a scam. There are huge costs of doing business that you seem to be taking for granted.

[borgqueenx]

You could argue that a candy bar machine should say the same thing since I can go to the grocery store and buy it a lot cheaper. Same goes for a beer at a bar. But, when I get my beer at the local pub and it costs $4.00 I don't go on the internet and say that bars are a scam. There are huge costs of doing business that you seem to be taking for granted.

Thats because i think paypal aint as big as other companys and everythings automised and already get alot of money by the income of transactions(the 3 or 4%). Not to talk about ebay.
But you have a good point there...

[buffo]

Thats because i think paypal aint as big as other companys and everythings automised and already get alot of money by the income of transactions(the 3 or 4%).

This is your misconception. Paypal is in fact a very large company. As explained by Gashead above, their computing costs alone are enormous. And while they may not have a large customer service staff that you can interact with, I promise you that they have many, many employees working behind the scenes to keep everything running.

Hard data for the number of total employees at Paypal are very hard to come by, but 4 years ago they had over 2000 employees in the US alone. Considering that they have offices all over the world, and the fact that they've been growing by leaps and bounds each year, it's clear that they have many thousands of employees today.

Also, in 2009 their revenue was 2.2 billion dollars. Their projected revenue for 2011 is 6 billion. That's a *huge* company... And running a huge international company costs money. Lots of it.

Adam

[borgqueenx]

Alright.
Thank you all for explaining.

But wouldnt it be more simple to just raise the sellers cost to 6% or something instead of "secretly" gaining more of currency converter transactions?

[norty303]

But wouldnt it be more simple to just raise the sellers cost to 6% or something instead

Not if they wanted sellers to keep using them it wouldn't. Its already on the verge of not being worth it, I'm sure that'd just push them over the edge.