Why does my currency automatically convert when accepting payments?

[smeriksen]

Hey I'm not sure why PayPal automatically converts my funds. I sell on ebay, and when I make sales there I only accept USD. Only US currency makes it into my account through eBay. When I sell off eBay there is a problem. I often sell on other forums and always deal in USD. Half of my customers are American, and the online hobby world works on USD, therefore payments or purchases are always USD. I've noticed that PayPal has been automatically converting my payments to Canadian funds without asking me. Before I would only convert to Canadian funds when I had to withdraw to.my bank account. This is a problem because now when I want to purchase something in USD, I am losing money because all my funds are Canadian, and PayPal gives horrible rates for conversion. Did PayPal switch something on all accounts to make it so you can only accept currencies from your country of origin? Is there a way I can turn this off? It doesn't make sense to me that I can accept USD payments on eBay, and the currency stays USD. But all other payments get converted to CDN. If it matters. I am located in Canada. I use eBay.com for all my selling on eBay ( never use .ca ). The other forms of payments I accept are just other PayPal members sending money. I don't send them invoices, they don't checkout on a website or anything like that. The other member and I simply come to a deal, I give my PayPal address and they send PayPal over in USD currency. Hope someone has some answers for me because this is very frustrating. Thanks

[jscharfe]

I am going through this and was basically told too bad from CS.   What a bunch of BS.  Found that is a US customer pays via credit card funding source, I receive USD.  If they pay USD from their available balance or their bank account I RECEIVE CDN.  FIX THIS, it never use to be like this.  Something changed in your coding or your practices are borderline illegal, 1 of the 2.

[noodlemama]

@PayPal_Michelle Hi Michelle, we have both EUR (primary currency) and USD wallets. When receiving USD, funds sometimes go to the USD wallet and sometimes they get converted to EUR and go to the EUR wallet. This is really annoying! All our settings are correct.

Is there any way to prevent currency conversions when receiving USD?

Thanks,

Stefan

[CanuckRunner]

@PayPal_Michelle As with other users, I'm having the same exact issue. I have a Canadian PayPal, with both a USD and CDN wallet. Yet when a friend tries to send me an amount in USD, it automatically gets converted to CDN!! This is SO wrong and makes no sense!! Isn't this the whole reason behind different currency "wallets"??

I also tried all the steps you indicated above, and my settings were exactly correct. So please tell us why this is happening because as one user mentions, this is borderline illegal/fraud!!!!

[jivamukti]

Same problem here, months later. (used to be different last year, suddenly changed this year). Do we have to assume that Paypal is doing this in an intentional fraudulent way in order to rip their customers off with their crazy bad currency exchange rates=!

[kaikai2019]

@PayPal_Michelle Is this problem resolved?

I have the same problem.  I cannot find the place to setup payment receiving preferences.

People send me USD, and I want to receive USD.

BUT some times, I do received USD, and some times, I received CAD.   I cannot figure out the reason.

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I just set the primary currency to USD.  Let's see if I still receive CAD.

[GibsonES335]

Any solutions to this yet? Anytime a buyer sends USD to my Canadian account, it is still converted to CAD automatically, I lose extreme amounts on exchange rate for no reason even though I want to keep a USD balance. Having a USD currency in my wallet does NOTHING. Setting USD as my primary currency also does nothing, USD payments are still converted to CAD automatically. 

[busterbrown2]

In my eyes it is a total scam, intended to make PayPal money from the exchange rates. I'll be looking for an alternate to PayPal.

[PayPal_Olivia]

Hi @GibsonES335 and @busterbrown2,

I'm very sorry to hear that you're unable to receive payments in your preferred currency. Thank you for checking all your settings. Please contact customer service for further troubleshooting. A representative can forward this issue to technicians in the event that it's resurfaced as an issue and can't be resolved on the call.

Please click Contact at the bottom of the PayPal website, then Call us, then log in.

I hope this can be resolved quickly!

Olivia

[venecian]

This has been happening for quite some time; it's a well-documented dark pattern, not a glitch. It's unacceptable. I don't blame the support team, who either know what's happening but can't well tell or are genuinely clueless, because they aren't the one making these decisions anyway.

This, among a few other things, has effectively driven me off of Paypal over the past few years. I now only process a small fraction of all transactions through Paypal and moved the rest elsewhere. It's a simple case of voting with my wallet.

Look around guys, as a seller, you don't have to use Paypal anymore these days. They'll keep doing this stuff, and they'll continue to shrug off the 30-some sellers who actually complain, until they run out of sellers. Right now, you're the one that's keeping them in business and endorsing their practices by accepting their business practices and continuing to use them.

I'll be impressed if this post stays published. Have a great day.

[krissyvee]

I'm having the same issue as of today. A US payment was sent which usually always arrives in US $ yet this time it converted it to CAD. This is a big issue since we can't just convert it back to US as it then takes another cut for conversion. Paypal, you need to rectify this issue ASAP