Malaysians can now accept Paypal and how to withdraw money locally?
Posted by Fione Tan, head Internet Marketing Coach
Good news for Malaysians “eCommercers”! Malaysians who wants to sell online, can also accept Paypal for their credit card processing and then this amount of money can now be transferred into your Malaysian credit card.
Some of you may have heard of the news about 1.5 months ago but just in case that you have not been informed, here are some paypal tips. When i was chatting with one of my 2006 coaching participant earlier this afternoon, she was already aware of this news when she called our internet marketing office in Oct, and was informed by my team about this good news. Then reminded me that hey, i’ve not written about this in the blog yet so here is a paypal guide on the ways that you can use paypal to accept payment for your items online, plus how to receive money for the items you sold.
First, what you need to do is to go to Paypal and then register for a Premier (if you wish to accept money using your personal name) or Business Account (if you wish to accept money using your registered company name). The buy now buttons or codes for online shopping is also given by paypal for free for you. All you need to do is to add your item to the paypal buy now or shopping cart and then copy the generated codes to paste into the source code of your website.
Then, how do you really get the money for items you sold? Customers will click on the buy now button and then use their credit card or paypal account to complete that transaction. When the transaction is successful then you will receive an email from paypal stating the name of the payee and the amount paid.
For most countries like Singapore or Hong Kong, all they have to do to withdraw the money is to login into paypal then click the withdraw button and then insert your local bank account information there. The process from the day you ask for this money withdrawal until the day the funds is received in your bank account is 1 week or less.
Is it free to withdraw money from your paypal account? Yes if you have reach the stated standard withdrawal amount in Paypal. For Singapore, you only need to accumulate S$200 or more in your paypal account while for Hong Kong, you need to have HK$1,000 or more in your paypal account. So if you only have S$100 in your paypal account, let’s wait till you reach S$200 before you request for the withdrawal or else you will need to pay a withdrawal fee.
How about Malaysians? We do not withdraw money into our Malaysian bank account. How you do it is to add your Malaysian credit card and then, when you wish to take out the money, you transfer this out to your credit card. How about the currency exchange? If your paypal amount is in US$, then this amount will then be converted back into Malaysian Ringgit based on the daily exchange rate by the bank. Then this amount will show up in your credit card statement.
Do i use paypal to accept money? I use paypal as an altenative payment mode only. eOneNet has got own direct payment gateway with the local bank, so whatever transactions we received, will be in our bank account by the 3rd working day itself plus the transaction fee is lower than those given by 3rd party ecommerce merchant gateways like paypal. I do have paypal and from what i checked just now, i’ve got four figure HK dollar and some US dollars inside the account but i’m unlikely to withdraw these out as i can use this money to pay for products and services which i buy online in US dollars and HK dollars.
So now Malaysians can easily withdraw money from paypal account via their credit cards. The only drawback is the loss in some value due to currency exchange from other currency to RM.
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November 20th, 2007 at 8:55 am
This would be a great news. Now I can activate the PayPal account for online transaction in RM. Do I have to pay any charges transfering the amount to credit card? Thanks for the tip.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:55 am
good news indeed. I saw this long time ago. The thing is…I already have a US based account. So I have been cashing out a long time already
November 20th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
HI kelly,
Yes, all you need is to add in your credit card. Then copy those paypal buy now codes to your website then people can buy items by paying via ct card into your paypal account.
I think they charge US$5 for each time you request to withdraw money into your credit card.
Yah Colbert, at least the other Msians who don’t own a US based account and wants to start on a low budget to accept credit card payment using Paypal can finally do so.
November 22nd, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Thanks for the tip.
November 25th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Hi Fiona,
After entering the 4-digit code for my Premier PayPal “expanded use” account upon paying US$1.95 through my credit card, I discovered that there was still a daily withdrawal limit of US$500/day – that means, each time I withdraw, a charge of US$5 would mean a charge of 1% or more depending on whether I withdraw up to US$500 or not .
If I were to withdraw only US$100, a charge of US$5 would translate into 5% withdrawal charge.
Therefore, while opening of PayPal merchant account is free, withdrawal of money from it means charges of 1% or more + forex charges (converting US$ into RM).
Views, anyone.
GT
November 25th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
HI GT,
Yes when using any 3rd party ecommerce merchant account there will be the certain limitations.
In the scenario above, you actually pay More than 5% you know, cos 1st when the client buys a product from your website for US$100 for example, then the nett amount showing in your paypal account first needs to be deduced with the ct card processing fee (between 3+% to 4+%). So sample let’s take it at 5%.
Then it means you get back US$95 right in your online paypal account. At the end of the day when you want to transfer the funds to your Ct card then you pay the US$5 per withdrawal.
Luckily we’ve got the direct ecommerce merchant account with the bank and therefore only about 3% fees are paid to the bank for all transactions plus the $ is in our account by the 3rd day already.
Rgds Fione
November 26th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Thanks Fiona,
…for your comments.
Nevertheless, to have a direct merchant account, our local bank needs us to have of a minimum amount of monthly trade volumes, right? Wonder, what’s the required monthly volume? Does it vary from bank to bank? And, which bank is the most volume-friendly? Anyone knows the answers?
Anyway, a high monthly trade volume required would mean that you’ve to be quite established in your ebusiness (like Fiona’s, I guess) before direct merchant account is of reach to you. Newbie, sorry-lah – bank mah!
Atleast PayPal accepts Malaysians (though without direct transfer of funds in PP into our local bank accounts only into our c.cards with withdrawal limits stated in earlier post). Some foreign payment gateways (such as CB’s, I believe, all of you know what that acronym means) do not allow Malaysian residents to open merchant accounts with them (since 2002, I believe).
Just because of some blacksheep-fraudsters – cloned c.cards, charged backs, etc – CB took the extreme measure: banning all from Malaysia including the innocent ones from opening accounts with CB.
We must continue to ask CB to open-up to all innocent Malaysians and at the same time our IT best should consider setting-up home-grown payment gateways of international standing such as CB but serving a bigger market including the Chinese market…:-)
Cheers,
GT
January 17th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Dear Fione,
Thank you for your tips and advice above.
My questions is: since there’s a card processing fee, withdrawal fee and also the the currency exchange, would it be more worthwhile to actually have the money transferred to a Singapore account instead?
And how do we go about applying for a direct ecommerce merchant account? What are the requirements like?
Thank you and look forward to hear from you.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
HI Ms chan,
If you say / apply using your Msia address, then you only have the option to either use:-
a) USA bank account
b) transfer $ into your credit card
But if you apply with your Sgpore address, and use a SG ct card to verify your identity, then the fees can be transferred to your SG bank account
Some of your friends might have S$ bank account correct and have paypal account, so you can transfer the $ to them via paypal too BUT you will realise that the nett amount received by them is EVEN lesser than what you will get when withdrawing into your Credit Card. Reason? Well, when they receive money from your paypal account, they have to pay the receive funds charges already.
To apply for a direct ecommerce merchant account, you need to find a bank and then your monthly online transactions must be at least say RM70,000 or so (plus with a company background)
We have been fortunate to have our own direct ecommerce merchant account since 2000.
rgds Fione
April 21st, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Dear fione,
I would like to know the steps on making a credit card merchant on our website. we are currently planning to use a bidding software and we are starting from scratch. Would appreciate a lot if could give some comments on the steps for setting up as well as the price. i see that most creditcard merchants are charging by per transactions, i would appreciate it if you could list out all the price from scratch til complete (we do not have anything set up yet).
Below are some information and questions:
1) We are at Brunei Darussalam, I can see that there is no BND transactions, is there any? if no, we are planning to use SGD instead.
2) We will be opening a bank account for receiving funds from the credit card merchant n is there any other way of receiving funds from customer that you can suggest? What are the steps that we need to do (for credit card merchants n all others)?
Best Regards,
David