Switzerland Merchant Complains About 8% PayPal Fees and Urges to Use Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies have expanded all over the world promising to reduce costs and enhance transaction speeds. According to the Reddit user Julices_Grant, PayPal has 8.12% fees for each sell he makes every time a buyer makes a purchase. He urges the community to start using cryptocurrencies.

The Reddit post had 2707 upvotes and almost 500 comments at the time of writing. He explained in another comment that he does not know how to adapt the check-out sum if the customer decides to pay using virtual currencies. Nevertheless, he is already accepting cryptocurrencies, as he mentioned.

In general, PayPal transactions in the same country have 2.9 percent fees. In general, if there is a conversion rate, the fee tends to be 5 percent of the whole transaction. In some cases, merchants have to pay more than 8 percent and up to 10 percent for selling products and receiving payments via PayPal.

The 8.12 percent might seem small in transactions under 100. However, if the merchant sells several products, the 8.12 percent fee becomes an important sum of money. In general, merchants have different costs that must be covered. Including an 8.12 percent fee does not help them grow as fast as desired.

PayPal is a centralized platform that tends to be very inconvenient for merchants. PayPal could freeze users’ accounts from one day to the other without a clear reason. Most of the cases, the funds are frozen for 3 months but there are some situations in which merchants need to wait more than 6 months to have their funds.

The merchant wrote on Reddit:

“But now I wished I never used PayPal, got a lot of money stuck for another 3 months (6 total) and they give me no reason at all. After being a customer of theirs for 6 years one day they decided nope were gonna hold your money, ban you from our service.”

Although virtual currencies promise to be a valid alternative to PayPal and centralized payment platforms, they have not expanded as a means of payment. Indeed, they’ve been struggling during the last months.

However, there are several companies trying to help the market increase the number of businesses accepting virtual currencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC) or Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Processing transactions in Bitcoin can take around 10 minutes if the network is not congested and just a few cents of a dollar per transaction. Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are cheaper and faster alternatives more suitable for merchants.

Nevertheless, Bitcoin developers are working in a scaling solution called Lightning Network (LN) and that is expected to help Bitcoin’s network to scale and process millions of transactions without delay and for very low fees.