Thanks PayPal, but no thanks

I have been using PayPal for a long time, mostly to pay for digital services in USD or EUR.

PayPal has this “friendly” feature, where it will convert the foreign currency to your card’s currency using their conversion rate. Their rate isn’t the best but I mostly let it slide because of the convenience, and the amount I’m dealing with is usually quite small.

Today I purchased something online that costs 149.99 USD. My credit card would charge me ~192 SGD, but guess how much PayPal charged me by using their rate? It’s 200 SGD.

What makes things worse is that my credit card charged me another 1% because that transaction was in Singapore Dollars but processed in overseas.

10 Singapore Dollars lost just in fees.

Why don’t you pay in USD instead?

Sure, but there is no such option on the payment page. Furthermore, PayPal is not telling me about the conversion, and all I got is just a button to continue my payment.

Browsing the settings page in PayPal doesn’t yield anything useful.

Thanks PayPal, but no thanks. I guess it’s time to gradually move away from this service and explore other alternative payment methods.