YugaTech | Philippines, Tech Reviews Blog

I already noticed this last week but didn’t post about it because I thought it was an old feature that I only recently noticed. Paypal sent in a press release today confirming that transactions can now be made in Philippine Peso.

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Yesterday, I had a short 15-minute one-on-one interview with reps from eBay South East Asia who flew in from their regional headquarters in Singapore to answer some questions for the media on eBay’s expansion in the Philippines.

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Updates: You can now have a Paypal Philippines account. Just sign up here. You can withdraw an amount not exceeding $500 per month to any debit, credit card or directly into your Philippine bank accounts. You will just need the bank codes and savings account number.

Maybe you’ve already heard of the plan and the efforts to make Paypal available in the Philippines.

Though I think we’re still far from getting that much coveted nod from eBay (owner of Paypal), I think it’s good to know that there IS a way to get paid by people who has Paypal. If you haven’t heard of it yet, spell X-o-o-m.

I know, it’s not the real deal, but it’s close enough. So how do you receive payments from Paypal users?

• Sign up for a Xoom account.
• Enter your personal bank account. See complete list of supported banks here.
• Create a Payment Button by indicating an item name/number along with the list price and the shipping fee.
• Paste the button on your website or a send the link to your client via email.
• Client receives the “request for payment”, creates a Xoom account or logs in and processes the payment using his Paypal account, credit card or eCheck.
• You get a confirmation email with the tracking number and receive the payment directly into your bank account in a matter of hours.

That’s it! Xoom payment limitation is from $25 to $2,500 per transaction. If you don’t have a bank account, you can opt to pick up the cash in the bank within minutes (list includes Equitable PCI Banks and Cebuana Lhuillier) or have it delivered into your doorstep. I was even able to get my remittance delivered at 9:00 in the evening before — good for people who are away during the day or at their offices working.

You can choose to receive the money in peso or dollar denominations. Is it expensive? Depends on what you’re comparing it to. If you send $50, there’s the $3.50 fee (7% transaction fee). If you send $1,000, the fee is just $8 (or 0.8% transaction fee). These fees apply if you want to receive in Philippine peso but it’s a little more if you opted for US dollars.

The catch? Their peso-dollar exchange rate ain’t that good. Today, it’s just US$ 1.00 = PHP 50.8687. Still if you factor that in, it’s still cheap.

Some guy contacted me the other day wanted to advertise on my site so I asked him for $45 for 3 month’s for a single link to his website. I sent him a payment request via Xoom and I had the money in just over 3 hours. See the tracking code for preview.

I know it’s not the real deal. We still ought to have our very own legit Paypal account somehow. But I’ve been using Xoom for 3 years and it works.

I think one way of convincing eBay to add the Philippines in it’s list of supported countries is by using 3rd-party services like Xoom. If eBay notices that there are tons of transactions going into the Philippines from people currently using Paypal, they may think that we’re not a high-risk country anymore.

[tags]paypal philippines, xoom[/tags]