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Send a payment along with the respective seller fees using the Mass Pay feature, so that your recipient gets precisely what you promised . Whether a product is sold or a service is performed, most people generally accept that the product or service provider is responsible for paying any applicable processing fees. But there are plenty of scenarios in which the recipient of your payment is not expecting or willing to pay any fees:
Of course, PayPal doesn't charge seller fees for payments received into Personal accounts, but these accounts have their own limitations (described in the introduction to Chapter 3), rendering them useless for this purpose. If you need to make a payment to a recipient's Premier or Business account for a specific amount without generating fees for him, you have two options: calculate the seller fees yourself or use Mass Pay. 2.6.1 Calculating the Fees YourselfThe first solution is to include the applicable fees with your payment, so that when PayPal deducts the fees, the recipient ends up with the intended amount. The equation (yes, there's some math involved) to calculate the total amount received is as follows :
Seller fees for Business and Premier accounts are typically 30 cents plus 2.9% of the amount sent. If you send someone $40, PayPal takes $1.46 (2.9% x $40 + $.30), leaving $38.54 for the recipient.
If you're having trouble remembering your high-school algebra, you might think that all you'd have to do is pay an extra $1.46 for the recipient to get the correct payment, but it doesn't turn out that way:
It's close, but you've still underpaid by 4 cents. The reason is that the goal, $40 in this case, was plugged into the wrong part of the equation. Here's the correct calculation:
Plugging $41.50 back into the original equation, you can see that it does indeed work:
Here's a general equation you can use to calculate seller fees:
2.6.2 Covering the Recipient's Fees Using Mass PayAnother, more direct way to cover the seller fees is to use an underused PayPal tool called Mass Pay [Hack #77] . With Mass Pay, PayPal deducts the fees from the sender's account rather than the recipient's account. In addition to being a simpler method than the arithmetic above, using Mass Pay in this way can make your bookkeeping easier, because the fees appear in your transaction history more clearly. But the best part about Mass Pay is that the fee is a flat 2% and is capped at $1.00 per transaction (e.g., per recipient). In the scenario described earlier in this hack, the recipient would get the full $40 and you'd be charged only $0.80 instead of $1.50. See [Hack #23] for other ways to reduce PayPal's seller fees. |
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