I'm so frustrated with trying to get information from PayPal and FNB. Can anyone please answer a few questions for me regarding PayPal as a payment means on a South African eCommerce site, geared toward servicing a South African market?
As far as I've gathered, one has to convert rands to USD when you're interfacing with PayPal. Does PayPal not provide some conversion means? It would mean a bit of work on my part, to create the conversion in the Ubercart PayPal module before handing the USD price to PayPal. This also might not be the rate that PayPal is using to convert and might cause inaccuracies and won't be great for customer or shop owner.
I was told by the FNB PayPal helpdesk that the site won't be able to accept credit card payment from South Africans! I know it sounds ridiculous, and I was astounded, but I need to clear this up - is this true?
Contact with PayPal has hit a dead-end on the mail front, as I need to use their online form which has a very short question space & I need to fish around for their international number, because the support mail has USA(?) local telephone numbers. Overall I'm not very impressed with the information given online by either company.
Please if someone has hit this wall before and knows the answers or can shed any light on this, it would be great.
Going to find that number and call PayPal right away.
Comments
I can't help with the
I can't help with the currency conversion issue as I'm using Paypal in USD directly (for international customers).
However I have used a South African credit card to make purchases on sites via Paypal so I don't believe this part is true.
There seems to be other contact numbers for Paypal on this site: http://hubpages.com/hub/ebay-paypal-phone-number .
It seems like Paypal was launched with a lot of fanfare, but FNB's enthusiasm for it has died down considerably since then.
SA Merchants
Hi Gomez - the issue that FNB told me about was specifically SA Customer paying an SA PayPal merchant. Did you pay an SA PayPal merchant specifically and have no problem?
I was just one the phone now with PayPal and what an irritation. 15 minutes of overseas call later, still no answers. 2 minutes of voice prompts that eventually failed to route me to the correct place, so I was put through to a random operator, who then asked me about 5 minutes of security questions. The rest of the conversation had us talking in circles about what exactly the issue was. She had no idea.
It really does seem like, as someone else put it: "a service meant to sell biltong to the americans only"
Test transaction
No, I didn't buy specifically from a local merchant, but I was under impression that a Paypal account is a Paypal account.
If you want to test it out specifically, I've built a guitar website with Drupal that uses Paypal. Go to 'become a member', choose the 'Plus' membership and after registration you'll be taken to the Paypal options. Choose the $5 (R35) recurring option, you can then cancel it via Paypal so that it is just a once off (I'd be happy to transfer the $5 back to you afterwards, just send me a message). I haven't linked my account to FNB yet, but it is a South African Paypal account and I can't imagine the way it works changing just because I link it to them.
Although as has been said, if you want local currency without conversions then other gateways may be better.
I think it is a problem with
I think it is a problem with both PayPal and FNB.
Last I checked, there are only about 16 currencies for PayPal, the rest must be converted. Obviously, ZAR is not one of them.
I agree with Gomez about the fanfare from FNB, all they did was to enable FNB clients to have PayPal access (to receive and send money through your FNB acount). But they have not really brought PayPal to SA as they made it out to be.
You can't really send money from an SA PayPal account to another SA PayPal account without going through the US and without having to do currency conversions.
Quentin
Thanks
Thanks Gomez_in_the_South & Max_Headroom for your responses.
I think the FNB Call-center was trying to say what Max_Headroom stated re. PayPal to PayPal for SA Users still goes through the US, but its still possible to get paid via that route.
I have the odious task of contacting my client with the news today, that PayPal is not an option for her site & that I didn't know all the facts before guiding her down that route.. I see though, there's been a lot more development on Payment gateways for SA, which is quite exciting - thanks Max_Headroom for your Paygate module, I may be making use of it soon.