Now that PayPal has suspended electronic fund transfers to bank accounts, you must be pretty worried about finding an alternative solution to rescue your funds from your PayPal account, right?
Well, hug it or hate it, PayPal has been the most trusted platform for online transactions despite its notorious higher fees, lousy customer service quality, or unreasonable actions at times.
However, under the current situation, it is only safe to withdraw your PayPal funds via PayPal check, i.e if you are gutsy enough to allow PayPal to send your check with the help of the Indian Postal Department via general post. I know it hurts to lose your check at times, but fortunately, I am NOT one of those who have lost their checks.
In any case, your PayPal funds are safe in the unfortunate event of your check being lost in transit. Blame it on the Indian Post Department and not PayPal, if that happened to you (but I seriously hope it doesn’t happen to you). If your check happened to be lost in transit, PayPal would reverse the transaction initiated by you. Well, you may lose precious time in the process though. I know at times, that’s probably the hardest part to cope with.
Despite what they claim as the ideal time for a PayPal check to reach the recipient, it usually takes roughly between 15-20 days. You should have the patience to wait and count on Indian Postal Services. It is very difficult to understand though why PayPal prefers to send your checks via genera post. But as I said you can’t reason with PayPal 🙂
Hate them, love them, but you can’t ignore them!
The bottom line is it takes a lot of patience (sometimes it can really be a testing time) until you receive your PayPal check and cash the same at your local bank.
Too Desperate to Wait for A PayPal Check? Then you can probably try the following services until PayPal restore their service to normal:
Online Remittance
I am not sure if other Indian banks offer this service too, but ICICI Bank makes it easy for your client to pay you via its Online Remittance service. Even your client doesn’t have to worry about going physically to the bank to send you your funds. They can do it online. Kindly, visit their website or contact your nearest ICICI Bank.
Western Union Money Transfer
This one is probably the quickest way to get your money online. However, their charges might appear higher to you. You can visit their website to find more about their service fees and compare them with PayPal fees. If your client is kind enough to visit one of his local stores where WUMT service is available, you can get the funds real quick.
Xoom
It is basically a money-sending service, pretty much like Western Union service. All you have to do is request your client to use your bank details to initiate a money transfer. The transaction will be verified by the Xoom department before it is executed. Your money should reach your bank account real fast. However, in Feb 2010, during the PayPal crisis, Xoom was not entertaining any payment to India. Not sure if they are doing the same this time too.
2Checkout
Their customer service is much better than PayPal’s, but they levy charges on every move you make. Unlike PayPal, they have registration fees. So most likely, they will deduct some fees from the money your client sends to your 2CO account. They also have a caution money fee which they allocate to protect their interests against any potential default on your part in the future. Take heart – this amount is refundable. Moreover, you can transfer your funds from PayPal to your 2CO account.
They also offer you an ATM card (they call it Payoneer Card) and you can use it at any ATM counter within and outside India. Great, right? But they levy a fee on each transaction! Now, that’s a rip-off, right?
These are my own experiences with cross-border money transfer services. Do feel free to share your experiences in the comment sections. I will be glad to answer your questions and learn more from your experiences too.
9 responses
lol. All my words in this blog 😛
Ha ha…actually I wanted to share my PayPal woes with my fellow PayPal users…..so came up with this….hope you like this effort, eh?
A new fact about Pay Pal :
I applied for a charity account with Pay pal because its free and supported by vbulletin software for payment subscription, I have all the documents like NGO Registration certificate, Memorandum of Society, Society PAN card, and the Bank details , bank details were verified by the Pay Pal by depositing amount of Rs. 2 and 40 paisa, after submitting all the document as per said in their website and in their emails, they denied me for the account, just because they have no tie-up with India regarding charity account, what the hell is this, why the pay pal people should not mention at the time sign up process. I have wasted around 1000/- rs in doing fax to pay pal and after 4-5 days they denied.
Don’t apply for a charity account with pay pal if you are living in India. Just wastage of time and money.
@Sonia I understand how frustrating it must have been for you, especially since you were approaching them for a noble cause. I totally agree with you when it comes to certain rules of PayPal, it appears rather wired. Let’s hope their taking notice of our woes and working hard to introduce more favorable policies for their Indian customers.
At the same time, Indian govt and RBI must also take the current situation into consideration and work together with PayPal to help cross-border transactions run smoothly and as per the directives of RBI.
We need to wait until that happens……by the way….thanks for your time on my blog 🙂
PayPal is earning a big amount from Indian customers, and not paying Tax to indian govt., I think RBI is doing just to collect tax and customer data from PayPal, this is good for our country.
We should support RBI.
how much time ot required for you to write this good article ?
I am an Internet entrepreneur and have faced the problems myself and tried out all the alternatives available under the sun. Therefore, I just wanted to share the solutions with my readers. It took me about 3 hours to write, edit and publish it. Thanks for your compliment 🙂
This is Indian Govt. where babu’s and ministers go away with 100’s of crores of tax money and make a professional pay from his nose. Indian Govt. is killing entreprenureship in India so that the big industrial houses grow richer each day. India Govt. is making 10% profit out of everything from what you eat to what you wear, from electricity to water from toll tax to VAT. Plus there is Income Tax, Plus Profession Tax.
The amount which Paypal transacts for whole of India is quite miniscule but the babu’s want to make money from everything posslble. You might soon hear that Finance Ministry has found a way to milk a bull very soon.
LOL….I have to agree with you, Ravi 🙂