Paypal prepay card

Posted by Flib on May 7th, 2009 filed in Business, Personal

Paypal is a pain in the neck from a business perspective, albeit not as much as other credit card processing companies (where 90days can be often seen). You receive the payments instantly but then need to wait 3-5 days after initiating a *manual* transfer to your bank account.

After being bombarded by adverts for the paypal prepay card everytime I logged in, I succumbed. I ordered a card.

Delivery was very quick and after ordering on the Monday, it was usable on the Thursday. However the implied ease of topping up isn’t what it says.

Most people that use Paypal are used to the idea of topping up accounts on sites and the payment being logged instantly. This is not the case with the card. If you top up on one day, the topup will register the next day. Added to that, one topup I performed on a Saturday didn’t register until the Monday morning.

So while I can reduce the 3-5 days I would get with a bank transfer to get the money available to use in my hand, its not perfect. Far from it in fact, since in addition to taking a day to register your credit, they also charge to extract your money from an ATM.

All in all, not as good a deal as they make out.