Ep. 3420 - Q&A: “Have I found a way to accept PayPal payments with no fees?”
Side Hustle School
Chris Guillebeau
4.7 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A crafty listener has found a way to avoid PayPal fees when accepting payments. Is he really on to something, or is it going to backfire on him?
Side Hustle School features a new episode EVERY DAY, featuring detailed case studies of people who earn extra money without quitting their job. This year, the show includes free guided lessons and listener Q&A several days each week.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A crafty listener has found a way to avoid PayPal fees when accepting payments. |
| 0:13.2 | Basically, this guy has found a way to not pay any merchant fees at all. |
| 0:17.6 | Usually if you use PayPal or Stripe or any other means of taking payments online, you have to |
| 0:23.7 | pay typically two to three up to five percent, sometimes 10 percent, depending on the platform. |
| 0:29.7 | The point is there are always fees. And a lot of people use PayPal, more than 300 million people. |
| 0:34.9 | In fact, around the world have PayPal. You can use it, I think, |
| 0:38.7 | in more than 150 countries. You can also receive personal payments. A lot of us use PayPal for |
| 0:44.2 | personal stuff, but you can, in fact, make business payments, use it for e-commerce. So this |
| 0:49.1 | listener wants to know if he's really onto something here, has he found this cool hack, or is it |
| 0:53.9 | unethical in some way? |
| 0:55.4 | I've actually known about this trick for years. It definitely works. It still works. We first mentioned it on the show a number of years ago, and it still, in fact, works. You just need to be aware of a couple things before you use it. So I'll tell you exactly how it works. Then you can decide for yourself if you want to do it. Basically, we're going to talk today about accepting PayPal payments with no fees. |
| 1:12.5 | Detailed question and the answer coming right up. |
| 1:20.9 | Hey, Chris, this is Randall. and I'm getting killed with PayPal fees. |
| 1:29.3 | We take a lot of small payments and they charge a transaction fee in addition to a percentage fee. |
| 1:35.3 | However, I think I found a loophole. |
| 1:39.3 | So for the past few months, I've asked our customers to pay us by sending their payments directly to my email address. |
| 1:46.8 | Then when I have to make payments to vendors, I use their friends and family option, and |
| 1:52.0 | there are zero fees. |
| 1:54.1 | Brilliant. |
| 1:55.1 | I wanted to pass this on to anyone looking for a similar solution and also ask you if you |
| 2:00.6 | think there's anything wrong with it. |
| 2:02.5 | Thanks for your time and help, Chris. |
... |
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