PayPal Stops Electronic Fund Transfer to India Banks
PayPal has stopped electronic bank withdrawals to customers in India and seems part of the continuing problems with Reserve Bank of India and international money transfer guidelines across India.
PayPal has announced that
In accordance with regulatory instructions, there will be a change in our withdrawal functionality in India starting on August 1, 2010. At present, you can request for either an electronic or cheque withdrawal of funds from your PayPal account. From July 29, 2010 onwards, you will only be able to request for a cheque withdrawal of funds from your PayPal account.
Paypal had earlier blocked personal payments to India as per RBI orders, then later restored payments but only for settlements for exports of goods and services, and that too with requirement of an purpose code.
While Paypal is working on restoring fund transfers to India, the cheque withdrawal is the only option available for the thousands of freelancers using the Paypal as a convenient payment option. Paypal has setup a page for Paypal India users on how they can request a cheque to cash out their funds.
To pacify the users, Paypal has also decided to refund the US$5 cheque withdrawal fee for cheque withdrawals made on July 29, 2010 onwards. I am sure lot of PayPal users will be disappointed as cheque withdrawal and bank deposit takes a long time for money transfer…
UPDATE (30/7): Paypal has restarted electronic withdrawals to India banks. To thank you for your loyalty, they will still provide the US$5 processing fee refund for any cheque withdrawals made from July 29 until further notice.
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Very disappointed. anyway thank you for the article.
Though they giving a refund of 5$ for every cheque request but still it’s a problem for many Bloggers, freelancers and onliine marketers based in India. Because such cheque will take atleast 5-7 days to reach you + another couple of weeks for clearance.. Hope this issue will get resolved soon…
And dont forget you can withdraw $2500 max per month by cheque. At least they should lift the limit till the issue is sorted for India Paypal users.
Really disappointing. Now we dont have any other option but to wait for further notice from Paypal.
The issue I am concerned about is that Paypal sends the cheques through regular mail, which works at snail’s speed in India. More concern about the mail being lost !
I think Paypal should let Indian users let us transfer our funds to Xoom for the time being, which also transfers international currency earned to bank accounts in India.
Paypal is such a crap system to withdraw amount through cheques.
Reasons:
1. Min withdrawl amount in USD is $150.
2. Even if you enter 6-digit PIN CODE for Billing Code, it won’t accept it and comes up with a disgusted error “Please enter 6-digit PIN CODE e.g. 123456″. How crap system is that? Can’t it even count how much 6-digits are?
3. It says no address field should be more than 33 to 35 characters long. Ok fine! But, when you select a state from a dropdown menu, in my case its “National Capital Territory of Delhi”. What a blunder? It do not gives other choice for delhities and if we select that option, it comes up with its more than 33 characters error. I think every people in Delhi or states having name more than 33 characters or so are facing this problem.
Just hope it resolves this, or if you may suggesst anything better than paypal?