Paypal increases fees for trading with the UK
The payment service PayPal has announced that it will increase the fees for payment transactions between EU countries such as Germany and Great Britain. For dealers and customers, this means costs more than twice as high.
It’s annoying for customers and retailers alike: The payment company PayPal has announced that it wants to introduce higher fees for transactions between the UK and the European Union. Like from one extensive price overview shows, the fee increases are due to Brexit.
The fee table, which includes the additional percentage fees for international commercial transactions, is due to go into effect on November 10th. Companies making payments between the UK and Europe will have to pay a fee of 1.29 percent going forward – significantly more than the 0.5 percent that most are currently paying. However, that’s still lower than PayPal’s standard 1.99 percent fee for the rest of the world. However, the bill of relying more on alternative services in the future will not work out, because Visa and Mastercard have already announced fee increases that will come into force in October.
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PayPal plans to simplify cross-border fees
The increase is likely to hit the smaller e-commerce players particularly hard, for whom trade between the United Kingdom and the EU is less and less worthwhile anyway, because the handling has also become more complex as a result of Brexit. Many online retailers have therefore already stopped their exports to the EU or vice versa to England for cost reasons – a problem especially for many customers with certain product groups such as special foods or local goods.
As PayPal announced to the British BBC, the move is seen as a way to simplify cross-border fees. In the highly competitive payment market, it will be easier for companies to “compare the prices of PayPal with those of other providers and better appreciate the value we offer,” explains a company spokesman.
The British Federation of Small Businesses, of course, sees it completely differently, for whom the news comes at an absolutely inopportune time. Since the beginning of the year, around one in four small exporters has stopped exporting to the EU, among other things on the grounds that selling to customers in the EU is associated with high costs. And more than 40 percent of small exporters said the value of their exports had declined in the past three months.
However, these are not likely to be the only changes that customers can expect in connection with e-commerce: There has been a dispute in Great Britain about a change in data protection laws for months – and the British could make compromises here in the future, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said a few months ago.
