Payoneer Review
Payoneer Overview
Payoneer is a financial institution headquartered in New York City, New York. The company was founded in early 2005 and it specializes in facilitating online payment transfers both inside the United States and also internationally. Payoneer currently has over four million users in over 200 countries worldwide and they can carry out cross-border transactions in more than 150 currencies.
Payoneer services are well used by many major players in the eCommerce sector, including Google, Amazon, UpWork, and Airbnb. If your business requires that you send or receive online payments either domestically or internationally Payoneer’s payment services may come in very handy for you. While companies such as PayPal offer similar capabilities, Payoneer has a stronger focus on carrying out international transactions and they claim to offer much lower overall costs than their competitors.
Pros
- Month-to-month billing with no fee for early termination.
- Free payments across Payoneer accounts.
- Payoneer is best for freelancers and international businesses.
Cons
- There are no payment gateway or virtual terminal.
- $29.95 annual fee.
- They have high credit card transaction fees.
Payoneer Products & Services
As we have previously mentioned, Payoneer is not a merchant account provider and does not offer the full range of merchant services that you would typically get from a traditional provider. Because of this, you would not be able to use a credit card terminal or POS system from your Payoneer account. There is also no support for a payment gateway or a virtual terminal. Below is a rundown of the features that are available:
Payoneer Account: Each Payoneer customer receives an account that can be used to send and receive payments. It is free to sign up, and you can do it online in just a matter of minutes. While this is not a merchant account, you can make and receive payments through credit cards. Payoneer makes use of an undisclosed backend processor to process these kinds of transactions.
Payoneer Prepaid Mastercard Debit Card: Your account also comes with a Mastercard debit card, which you can use to make your payments after you would have transferred sufficient funds to your Payoneer account.
Mobile App: The company offers a free Payoneer mobile application, which is available for both Android and iOS. The app allows you to check your account balance, withdraw funds, and view transactions. However, it does not include the ability to make payments. For many users, this limited functionality of the application defeats the purpose of having a mobile application, and it has received mostly mixed reviews for this reason.
eCheck Processing: All Payoneer accounts come prebuilt with an eCheck (ACH) processing for both making and receiving payments. While there is no additional charge for this service, there are processing fees per transaction.
Online Reporting: As you would expect, you can log in to the website to access your Payoneer account. This is where you will go to make payments and transfer received funds to your local bank account.
Security Features: All the transactions are encrypted, but Payoneer does not disclose specific encryption methods on their website or offer any details on other security features that they use. Unfortunately, there are a lot of complaints online from users whose accounts were hacked and were used to make unauthorized payments.
Payoneer Fees & Rates
Payoneer is reasonably transparent about their service costs, with most charges being disclosed on the Fees page of their website. You should be warned, however, that there are a lot of complaints about extra, hidden fees that you will only find buried in the fine print of your contract. Below is a breakdown of the costs that are associated with the most common transaction types:
Payments from one Payoneer account to another are always free. This is a real benefit if your customers also use Payoneer.
Payments that are made through a local bank transfer incur a 0% fee, if made in US dollars. Transfers in euros or British pounds are free.
Payments made through eCheck also attract a 0% fee in US dollars.
Payments that are made through credit card incur a flat 3.0% processing fee.
These basic fees simply assume that there is no currency conversion involved in the transaction. To withdraw your funds to your local bank account from your Payoneer account, you will pay a flat $1.50 each time. If you need to convert the withdrawn funds to your local currency, you’ll pay up to 2% above the mid-market rate for the conversion to take place.
The company does not charge most of the fees that are traditionally associated with merchant accounts. There are no account setup fees and no monthly account fee. You will only have to pay an annual fee of $29.95 for your Payoneer Mastercard debit card, but this can be removed in some cases. While not disclosed, we have heard numerous reports that are regarding an account inactivity fee that Payoneer charges on a monthly basis if you do not use your account at all during that month. While the fee does not appear to be very high, it’s still a rip-off to charge you a penalty for not making use of your account. There are other, undisclosed fees as well, so you should review your contract terms and conditions very carefully before you sign up for an account.
Contract Length & Early Termination Fee
Payoneer bills on a month-to-month basis and does not require that you sign a long-term contract. There is also no early termination fee for closing your account, although you will still want to follow the account closure procedure that is listed in your contract very carefully to make sure that your account is actually terminated.
Customer Service & Technical Support
Payoneer includes a very useful Customer Support Center on its website which is made up of a very detailed and thorough knowledge base and FAQ for providing answers to questions and troubleshooting problems. If you cannot find the answer to your question here, you will have to log in to your Payoneer account to access the live chat feature. You can also contact Payoneer by email, but telephone support happens to be limited to just reporting a lost or stolen debit card.
Technical Support through live chat is only available in English, Russian, or Spanish. If you do not speak one of these languages, the email option supports dozens of other languages.
