No matter the type of work you do online, you might have heard about Payoneer before. It’s one of the most popular payment methods for bloggers, affiliate marketers, freelancers, and Amazon sellers.
But what is Payoneer? Is Payoneer legit? Is a Payoneer account free? Find out the answers to all of these questions and more in this short and comprehensive Payoneer review.
Payoneer is a company based in New York City, which was created back in 2005. The service specializes in online payment transfers, and it is extremely popular with Amazon affiliates.
What Payoneer basically does is to create several virtual bank accounts so that you can receive payments from other countries even if you don’t have a local account. In most cases, with a standard Payoneer bank account, you can receive transfers in the US dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, and British Pound.
The reason this service grew so quickly is that some companies, such as Amazon US, prefer paying their affiliates directly to their local bank accounts.
Since not all affiliates are based in the United States, before Payoneer existed, they had to wait for a cheque for several months.
Any company can deposit funds into your Payoneer account and you can also receive funds from other individual accounts.
If you already have a Paypal account, and chances are you do, you might be asking yourself why you should try Payoneer, instead. Well, there are a few reasons.
If you are based in Europe, for example, Paypal will convert the money that you have in your account into Euros, and the charge for the transfer fee can get up to 10 Euros.
On top of that, the conversion rate isn’t really something to write home about when it comes to Paypal. Plus, you don’t get a Paypal card that you can use to directly withdraw money from an ATM.
In Payoneer’s case, you have two advantages in this sense. You both get a prepaid card that you can use to withdraw money in your local currency, and the fees are much lower. For example, for a bank transfer of about $100, you pay just around $2 in fees.
First of all, creating a Payoneer account is completely free. All you have to do to set everything up is to verify your identity and give Payoneer your bank information. This is necessary for when you want to transfer funds into your bank account.
After creating your Payoneer account, you will receive a prepaid card at home. Even though it’s not a credit card, it functions much like one, in that you can use it to get airplane tickets, make payments online, and you can also utilize it in any store.
There is also a mobile Payoneer app available and you’ll be glad to know that it has been improved a lot over the years. You can use the same service for eCheck processing and a variety of other payments.
We’ve already mentioned that creating a Payoneer account is completely free, but the service itself isn’t.
You will have to pay a fee of $29.95 per year for the management of the prepaid card. This might seem a lot for people who use their Payoneer account on occasion — but it’s not for individuals who get paid through Payoneer every month.
The conversion rates used by Payoneer are the official MasterCard ones. For local bank transfers, you pay around $2.99 per transfer, but a USD SWIFT transfer will set you back by $15.
Transferring money from one Payoneer account to another is completely free, but you will have to pay up to 2% if the recipient isn’t a Payoneer user.
It used to be that you couldn’t bill people through Payoneer unless you had received $5,000 from companies. This meant that you had to wait for a while. By company, Payoneer means firms like Amazon, Upwork, and any other such clients.
Fortunately, they seem to have dropped this requirement, so if you are a frequent user, you will be able to bill clients or transfer money no muss, no fuss. Note: we don’t know how long they will maintain this feature, so it might change at any time.
Another obvious disadvantage to using Payoneer would be the $29.95 yearly fee.
Is Payoneer safe? Yes and no. It used to be that there was no virtual terminal or payment gateway, which made transactions unsafe in comparison to what other services might offer.
But these days, the company is asking most users to provide their mobile number so that they are sent a code each time they make a transaction online. This feature significantly improves the safety side of Payoneer.
Moreover, there have been some complaints in the past about how Payoneer handles customer support. The service can also be slow at times, but this rarely happens nowadays. Plus, you can’t use Payoneer for large payments.
The first benefit of using this service is that it is an alternative to a corporate overseas account. Even if you are not a US resident or you haven’t created a bank account locally, you can still receive payments from the US, for example.
The same goes for Europe, Japan, and the United Kingdom, and many other places and currencies.
Another advantage would be that you can quickly and conveniently withdraw money from the prepaid card using any ATM. You are free to transfer the funds to your bank account, seeing how the fees are much lower for this type of transaction.
The platform is relatively easy to use, and the mobile app works properly. There are over five million people using the service at this time, which means that it does work one way or the other.
If you don’t want to create a Payoneer account and you’re still looking to get international transfers, you can try one of the following services:
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