Currency exchange rates for paypal

Question

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...

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

I too had a requirement like yours. This post helped me. i'm using what was suggested there and it's perfect. Hope it helps you too.

Answer 5

I emailed Paypal and requested that they provide transparent information on when they perform updates. They could at least state how often and when they update currencies - for example, every 24 hrs at midnight PST or twice a day at 12 and 24:00 PST.

I suggest everyone emails them and requests this.

The more pressure on them, the better the service! Sol

Answer 6

I just found this: https://www.x.com/thread/38451

so it look like there is something you could use
https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1400
https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1401

I also found this
http://apipay.net/easyapi/index.php?sid=paypal&id=nvp_adpay&ac=convertcurrency

and there is someone that already posted a question about that
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1789699/php-example-for-paypal-adaptive-payments-convertcurrency-api