Many Indian personal and premier Paypal account holders appear to have received the following email:
In compliance with Indian regulations, if you are selling products and services to customers globally, please review the following important information:
• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services should be withdrawn to your bank account within 30 days.
• While making the withdrawal please make sure you select the purpose code that best fits your business.
• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India. This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.
• If you would like to make purchases on any website that accepts PayPal, you can continue to use any credit card issued by a bank in India.
For any questions, please reach out to our customer support teams by following the steps below:
1. Log into your PayPal account
2. Click “Contact Us” at the bottom of the page
3. Click on “Send Us” an email or “Call Us” to reach us by phone
Not all Indian Paypal account holders have received this mail . Initially many thought it was a phishing email, but later Paypal has confirmed that the email is genuine. Also Gmail seems to have flagged the email as spam. They have also not specified a date from which these rules / restrictions will come into effect.
The biggest restriction is:
• Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India. This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.
The main disadvantage of this rule is that a Paypal account holder will lose money in transaction fees – when you withdraw to your Indian bank account in Indian Rupees, you lose 2.5-3% in currency conversion fees and when you again pay through credit card, the credit card company will charge up to 5% as currency conversion fees for converting the Indian Rupees back to US Dollars. Also many people in India avoid getting a credit card, since many Indian credit card issuers are notorious for their poor service, inaccurate billing and hiring the services of questionable collection agents.
Paypal checks are sent by ordinary post and take up to month to delivered. The status of bank withdrawals of many Indian account holders on or after 7 April 2010 is shown as pending. Of all the online payment processors, Paypal seems to most regulated in India because it has the largest number of users in India and uses NEFT.
Update 14 April, 2010 : There seems to be a problem with Paypal withdrawals to bank accounts in India on 7 , 8, 9 April, 2010 and their status is still shown as pending. Withdrawals on 10 April 2010 have been credited to the bank account . Some users have requested cancellation of the pending withdrawal, but they may incur a foreign currency losss and it is not clear whether the forex loss will be credited back to the account
Yes, you are very much right, you cannot open a PayPal account for Charity, if your charity is registered in India, same thing happened with me also, I applied a Charity account for my client and after completing all the formalities they just denied for the account.
I have a suggestion for you, apply for a normal account with some other website and then use it for your Charity website, I have list of websites who are doing the same thing.
You can also try some other Payment Gateways like CCavenue, but in case you are using Vbulletin script, I don’t think so that it may help you. The first suggestion may work for you.