Gianfranco Irlanda wrote:
First of all, PayPal is something incredibly complicated and expensive compared to what happens in US (at least it was last time I checked). Dunno about BidPay but I guess it is comparable.
So I gather.
It seems like credit cards are also a different story in Europe as well. They are probably too freely available over here. (I've heard stories of cats and dogs getting them, but I'm sure those are just urban legends.)
Yes, it can be done. There are two ways of sending an international postal money order, ordinary and online. The online money order is no less than a MoneyGram money order, fast but extremely expensive (for an ordinary money order you pay under euro 5/US$6 for a transfer up to euro 516/US$650, with the MoneyGram for a similar amount you pay euro 31/US$40...) The ordinary money order is done via ordinary (what else?) mail, so it may take a lot of time *just* to get out of Italy...
Well, $6 for a $650 transfer seems pretty cheap to me. I'm paying about 4 times that for this wire transfer, which is on par with PayPal charges.
The bank wire transfer has, usually, a fixed fee - I recall something around euro 16 for more than euro 900 (in the Euro zone the cost is very low now, the same for a national wire transfer).
I'm paying $15 for a $380 transfer - and that is just my bank's stake of it. Hopefully using the SWIFT code will cut out additional fees, but from what people have told me it could add up to at least twice that.
Take into account that, unless you live in a very small town or you are veeery lucky, in Italy a post office means at least 45 minutes of queue (sometimes more) and you could even have the bad chance to find an employee that doesn't know how to proceed with the international money order (first hand experience - I had to explain her, step by step, what to do...)
Ummm -- sounds exactly like my post office. I sold a bunch of books last year and wound up in the embarrassing position of an Aussie buyer telling me how our postal regs worked, and them me telling the postal clerk (and then another clerk and then the supervisor)... Good thing the man in Quinns knew the US postal codes... But in the course of selling 500 books I learned that post offices are totally unpredictable. A 45 minute wait is on the high end, but not unheard of. A 20-30 minute wait is common in my post offices. 10-20 is the norm.
Bank employees usually do know what they are doing.
Well, I had to explain the SWIFT code (based on what folks told me here and off line) to the person at my bank, who put me on hold to research it. Roughly on par with the post office, IMO.
And I cannot imagine a way your account data could be used other than sending you money
you can;t and I can't - but if we could, and we lacked all morals, we'd be rich. There _are_ unaccountably rich people out there...
But I'm just being paranoid....
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...
Hope this helps.
Ciao,
Gianfranco
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