PayPal does currency conversion when not necessary and charges more

[crontab]

Hello,

I paid online on Fnac.com, it's a French store that charges in euros. The total for the purchase was €79.99. I used my euro Revolut card linked to my PayPal account.

Now, this transaction appears on Revolut as €83.91 and it also shows another amount in GBP which is £73.27. It looks as though the amount was converted to GBP and then back to euro again and became €83.91.

I contacted Revolut's customer support, they suggested to contact PayPal to check why it charged my card in pounds even though my card is a euro one and the purchase was in euros too.

(Customer support did not respond to my multile requests)

Your help will be much appreciated.

[Panopamelix]

Hi @crontab,

I just experienced the exact same problem today, by paying my Spotify Premium subscription with my Revolut card (euros) via Paypal.

I should have paid 14,99 euros, but it says 13,92 GBP (pounds) on my Paypal confirmation mail, and I was charged 15,64 euros.

Did you solve the issue ? If yes, how ?

[crontab]

Hey @Panopamelix

That was a long time ago. Revolut's customer support suggested to contact PayPal which I did, and guess what, PayPal never replied to me.

They are probably doing conversions based on the bank's country or something similar, i.e. if your bank is based in the UK then PayPal assumes the currency is GBP, then Revolut does its part converting the Euro amount to GBP, and finally PayPal converts it back to Euros as requested by the merchant. Or something along those lines.

What I did was, I removed my Revolut card from PayPal and added a true Euro card to it from a Eurozone bank. No problems since then.

Soon though, Revolut will be assigning European IBAN numbers to its customers who are outside the UK, so that might solve it... or not, I don't know!

[Panopamelix]

Hey @crontab,

After reading several topics about this issue, I arrived at the same conclusion as you : Paypal doing conversions based on the bank's country.

So I think the new European IBAN for Revolut customers will fix this definitely... we'll see !

By the way, I think I have found a way to address the issue for the moment. There is an option deeply hidden, which let's you choose if Paypal or your bank does the currency conversion :

https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Buying-with-PayPal/How-can-I-change-the-currency-preference-that...

@Ajvar wrote:

Those PigsPal hied convertion properties in the deepest hole like this:

My Account -> Profile -> My Money -> My preapproved payments -> Update -> See Available Funding Sources (or Set Available Funding Sources) -> Conversion Options (for card you'd like to change this option)-> Bill me in the currency listed on the seller's invoice -> Submit

Apparently, this option is also available when paying on a website using Paypal, when choosing the card.

I changed the option on my Revolut card for Spotify Premium automatic payment, I'll update this post next month if the fix actually worked !