I have been using Paypal to collect a small rental payment from a renter for about a year now. There had been no fee from Paypal until yesterday, when I notice a charge of 3% fee each month for the past 3 months. After some inquiries from paypal and my renter, here is what i found.
Paypal changed the personal payment options couple months ago. The option of "paying living expenses" was gone so my renter picked "product and services" (which is more appropriate than "gift"). When I received a payment notification email from paypal, I see the full amount she paid on the email, without any mention of the fee. So I did not notice the discrepency til 3 months later.
Obviously, if my renter and I paid a bit more attention, we would have caught the error in time and redo the transactions right away. But we both put a lot of trust in paypal. The paypal user interface seems very simple and straight forward so we did not think twice before clicking buttons. To paypal credit, the customer service agent I spoke with was very helpful and knowledgable. In the end, I decided to redo the payment this month and pay the fee of the past 2.
My renter and I are now discussing whether we should do online banking directly instead. We both living a busy life and would like to have one less thing to keep an eye on or to worry about. I hope that paypal can provide a better user interface to avoid the mistakes my renter and I made. For example, if a payment receiver got charged for a fee, please indicate it on the email. Also, the payment option "Living Expense" is very helpful to situation like ours. It would be great to see the option available once again.
