Currency conversion fees for online purchases

[king1]

Was reading this article this morning...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-tr...xt-holiday


I noticed this behaviour several years ago so thought it might be worth mentioning here...

When buying stuff online from overseas, I always find it is best to allow the purchase to occur in the local currency ie GBP USD etc
The currency conversion websites do at the time of purchase is always at a higher rate and loaded with fees.


As an example, my last online purchase was for a subscription to a remote desktop support app...

The purchase cost was Ôé¼98.00 euro
Using the currency conversion offered by paypal as payment processor, the total charged would have been $176.00 NZD.
By electing to pay in euro, and allowing the conversion to happen on the credit card (ANZ) the overall cost was $168.00 NZD

Paypal seem to have a conversion fee of around 3.5% plus a decidedly obscure fixed fee...
ANZ credit card conversion fee is 1.3%

HTH

[C_T_Russell]

Paypal fees are getting ridiculous to say the least.
Credit card conversion fees are not alot better. But hey, thats how the banks make money from us.

[harm_less]

My international purchases are usually paid by way of PayPal as our account normally has a credit balance which we can use.

Our PayPal's 'home' currency is NZD so if the purchase is made through PayPal it is charged to us by PayPal in that currency which if it becomes a charge to our credit card means our bank/Visa don't then charge us an "Offshore Service Margin" which is another potential added cost to be aware of.

I agree that PayPal don't make it easy to drill down to their fee & currency conversion structure but I know as a seller that NZ members of PayPal are charged about 3.5% on our sales (a fixed charge plus a percentage of the transaction amount actually) but this is on the seller so you're not likely to see this as an extra on the listed price.