To sign up for a one month subscription to the game World of Warcraft, I used my Paypal account. I was charged $14.99 USD by the game company but Paypal charged me $15.05 CAD on my credit card with a posted exchange rate of 1 CAD = 0.996614 U.S. The Canadian dollar has been stronger for months, so I opened a case with Paypal.
First Answer from Paypal:
"As you know currency conversion happens all day every day. The site that I keep my eye on is XE.com, that seems to be the most up to date currency site." -Craig
My response:
The exchange rate used in the paypal transaction is not what is logged on the XE site for May 28th. The actual rate should be 1 CAD = 1.0241704034 U.S. Dollars.
Second Answer from Paypal:
"Based on the transaction history, when you initially made the payment it was for $15.05 CAD, which translated to $15.39 USD at the time. Once that was done, the payment was submitted to Blizzard Entertainment totaling $14.99; it converted the money down to $14.99 ultimately, so that is the amount that you ultimately paid." -Curtis
What??? I called their support line only to be placed on hold forever. I finally hung up. I looked up posts on their own paypal website and saw numerous people complaining about how Paypal does not accurately exchange foreign currency.
I believe this needs to be investigated as clearly there is no way I should be paying more in CAD than the USD price due to the exchange rate. If Paypal is charging some fee in the background to the buyer, they should show this explicitely. If not, they should charge the credit card the same amount charged by the seller and let the credit card company calculate the exchange rate.
Thx
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