Receiving payments through personal Paypal accounts are no longer free! Yup! It’s true and it has been a few days since Paypal implemented these new fees structure for personal Paypal accounts.

Last Friday on the fifth of June, my sister Judy was surprised that a payment that she received in her personal Paypal account had charges. Of course, her initial reaction was this is clearly a mistake. She immediately contacted Paypal support through email, stated her case and demanded to get a refund for fees that were mistakenly deducted. Well, what did we expect? The response was to visit the fees page of Paypal. Not contented with the response that she got, I advised my sister to call support and so we can hear answers to our questions directly from a customer service representative. Curious about my sister’s case, I stayed beside her throughout the conversation.

We were both surprised to learn that there was no mistake at all. Paypal has really started to charge fees to personal account. According to the support person, the fees page of Paypal isn’t updated yet but they have definitely started charging fees. I checked my recent Paypal transactions and found out that fees were deducted from all the payments that I received starting June 5, 2009.

You can try and visit the send money page in your Paypal account and you will see the new “Purchase” and “Personal” tabs. The receiver of the Paypal money will incur fees if you send money and selected “Purchase”. However, if transactions are made under “Personal”, no fees will be charged.

Damn! Where did that come from? No email notifications, no updates in Paypal’s Policy Updates page and just nothing to let us know about this. Oh well, I guess there’s no longer anything that we can do about this.

This is not good at all especially for internet entrepreneurs like me. I’m sure there are many people out there who used to provide two Paypal email addresses, one personal and one premier, to their clients to avoid fees. I’m guilty of doing this too. Imposing fees to personal accounts just means that our revenues will be reduced by a few hundred dollars.