Currency exchange rates for paypal

28
votes

Does anyone know a way to get the currency exchange rates for paypal?

We have custom shopping cart and use Paypal (Website Payments Standard) to handle payments. Our 'home' currency is Euro, but we would like to present our customers the option to pay in different currencies (USD, CAD, AUD and GBP).

PayPal offers the option to:
    a) automatically convert our Euro quoted prices to, for example, USD upon checkout
    b) checkout in USD directly

With option a):

  • We get paid in Euro, the customer pays for the currency exchange (good).
  • The customer does not know what he/she is going to be charged in USD until checkout. (bad)

With option b)

  • The customer pays in USD, then the currency is converted into EUR and we pay the the currency exchange.
  • The customer never has to worry about the different currencies (excellent)
  • We do not know the exchange rate PayPal is going to use so we cannot quote the correct prices to our customer (showstopper)

So my question is:
  Does anybody know a way to get the PayPal exchange rates?
or
  Does anybody know how to make a good estimate?

Update:
PayPal updates it's exchange rate 2 times a day. (at least, that is what they state). They use the Interbank Exchange Rate provided by ??? and add a 2.5% spread above this rate to determine their retail foreign exchange rates. Unforunately, there the Interbank Exchange Rates vary from source to source and from minute to minute.
We have been monitoring the PayPal exchange rates and cross referenced them with the Official reference rates provides by the European Central Bank. the results vary widely, somewhere from 1 to 6 ! percent...

9
paypalcurrencyfinance
I too had a requirement like yours. This [post][1] helped me. i'm using what was suggested there and it's perfect. Hope it helps you too. [1]: stackoverflow.com/questions/181990/… – Senthil Kumar
Hi Jacco, do you know where I can see that information (on the Update)? Need to show someone, cheers – DiogoNeves
it is somewhere in their documentation on currency exchange rates. – Jacco
From my experience(USD to TRY) it is ~2.5% – Semra

9 Answers

7
votes

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_convert-currency-withdrawal is a (needs login) page on Paypal where you can perform currency conversions at Paypal's rates.

4
votes

I just found this: https://www.x.com/thread/38451 (This link is now broken)

so it look like there is something you could use
https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1400 (This link is now broken)

https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1401 (This link is now broken)

I also found this
http://apipay.net/easyapi/index.php?sid=paypal&id=nvp_adpay&ac=convertcurrency (This link is now appears to be broken also)

and there is someone that already posted a question about that
PHP example for PayPal Adaptive Payments ConvertCurrency API

3
votes

Regarding getting a good estimate; PayPal says here that they base their rate on the "Interbank Exchange Rate" and that "Customers may use these rates as a reference".

However they of course go on to say that these rates are not guaranteed, and if you want the precise rate you need to see what rate they apply in the transaction.

I am not aware of any way of obtaining the precise rate programmatically.

I suppose you could make your own payment of $0.01 every day and observe the exchange rate applied - but even that assumes they only update their rate every day.

2
votes

I contacted their customer service and they explained, that at least in my region, they added 3.5% over the XE.com exchange rates. I was able to hand this to my accountant and use it as evidence of a tax-deductible business expense.

1
votes

Their exchange rates are ~10% off the daily spot rates in the currencies I use (THB/USD). And although I have USD bank accounts they refuse to transfer USD to my USD accounts. Not sure if that is their policy for all countries / all currencies though, but for THB/USD they are inflexible.

Another thing to be aware of when using paypal - their "seller protection" is limited depending on what you sell and through what channels. In other words, you need to do a certain amount of fraud checking yourself to avoid shipping to customers who have used stolen credit card #s.

1
votes

As you say, they base the "PayPal exchange rate" on the "recent currency conversion rate". In my experience, they add 3-4%.

The only place I found to get the PayPal exchange rate is here but it needs you to be logged in.

I've created a publicly visible Google doc that lists the historical rates.

This allows you to track the PayPal exchange rates so that you know when best to withdraw or transfer your money. Please contribute to the data by adding today's rates into this form.

1
votes

If you are strictly interested in conversion from and to Euro, the European Central Bank has a public (and free) xml document that is updated daily: http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml

Parsing it is easy:

$XML=simplexml_load_file("http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml");
foreach($XML->Cube->Cube->Cube as $rates){
  if($rates["currency"] == 'USD'){
    $rate = ''.$rates["rate"];
    // do your thing with it here
  }
}
0
votes

I found paypal adaptive payment service to integrate currency exchange rates on website but it is not working correctly on live account. You can go through the details from the link https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/products/adaptive-payments/

0
votes

Well, the following service should be useful for the conversion: http://rate-exchange.herokuapp.com/. Our company uses this for many live projects including an Chrome extension which seems running so far.