How to avoid automatic currency conversion on withdrawals
Platforms like PayPal and Shopify automatically convert payouts into the local currency of your debit card or business address, even if you have a bank account for the original currency. This forces you to eat conversion fees instead of keeping the funds in their original currency to pay factories for products and run ads. To bypass the forced exchange, some people eventually resort to building an entirely separate second store.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Using a multicurrency account or bank account that holds euros in a country that uses eurosDid this help you?
- 2Setting up a foreign LLC or registered company in the target country.Did this help you?
- 3Creating a completely separate store for the target market.Did this help you?
- 4Upgrading to a more expensive premium platform tier.Did this help you?
- 5Temporarily accepting and paying the conversion fees.Did this help you?
- 6Setting up a US LLC and using a US business bank account like Mercury to receive direct USD payouts.Did this help you?
- 7Upgrading to an advanced platform subscription tier that supports multi-currency payouts.Did this help you?
- 8Switching to a self-hosted platform like WooCommerce and using independent merchant services with better fee structures.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“The problem is that when customers pay in USD, shopify will not pay out in USD, because I'm a UK company (Even though I have a US currency account). So on top of the shopify transaction fees they are going to charge me a currency conversion fee.”source ↗
“I want my income to stay in USD because I will be rolling all that cash back to the factory for more product orders and using it to pay for ads etc...”source ↗
“I am a Canadian merchant and hit these conversion fees so I set up a USD account and switched my store to USD to avoid exchange fees and then they charged a "foreign transaction fee" anyway. My Shopify fees were nearly 6% on every single sale”source ↗
“It looks like Paypal is going to send the currency local to where the bank that issues your debit card is.”source ↗
“I want to withdraw money from my PayPal account to my card, but I don’t want PayPal to automatically convert it into my country’s currency. I want to withdraw the money directly in euros.”source ↗
“The problem is that when customers pay in USD, shopify will not pay out in USD, because I'm a UK company (Even though I have a US currency account).”source ↗
“I want my income to stay in USD because I will be rolling all that cash back to the factory for more product orders and using it to pay for ads etc...”source ↗
“I went through this exact thing (different countries, but essentially the same setup). I ate the conversion fees for a period of time, then just bit the bullet and setup a second store.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 6Why are Shopify payouts held and put on a rolling reserve?
- 2How to ask for a pay raise without risking the gig
- 4Why are bank transfers so slow for time-sensitive payments?