If your processing your sales on PayPal and using that same account for personal matters, your next statement may be a shocker.
Personal accounts are now charged a 2.9% fee + 30 cents to receive payments for “Goods” or “Services”, something that was free. And there wasn’t a stand alone announcement of this change either.
But it gets better! Somehow, paying fees for something that was free makes PayPal a more “useful experience”. No, really, just see what Charlotte Hill, PayPal PR Manager had to say about it:
“We didn’t want to make a huge formal communication out of this pricing change, because we weren’t really adding any fees, and we were hoping it would be a more useful experience for people.” — Charlotte Hill, PayPal PR Manager
They didn’t announce the change because it would be a more useful experience. PayPal’s director of product marketing, Heinz Waelchli was also doing his best imitation of Xavion Glover on the PayPal blog about it too. It seems that the thought never occured to PayPal that affiliate marketers are generally sole proprietorship businesses. Meaning that there isn’t a seperate checking account, business entitiy, etc. That both personal and business transactions occur on an affiliate marketers PayPal account. Which is both easy (given downloads to Quicken) and makes alot of sense for those affiliate marketers who are keeping things simple and building their business up to the point where they will not only need to seperate the business as an entity, but will be able to afford it as well.
The charging both sellers and receivers for transactions will bring in alot of cash for eBay Inc. which owns PayPal. But it can also backfire mightily if affiliate marketers decide to shop around and choose Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, or any number of other transaction processors.
There’s a good blogpost about it all HERE:
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