Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

If you are a Paypal Indian customer, your life with Paypal is officially over thanks to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Indian Government. You would have received an email to this effect already and would have realised that the Paypal account you so cherished is now just a wormhole to bring money into your bank account. You cannot use your earnings to purchase stuff on the Internet. So you can no longer use the hard earned money from your website to purchase hosting or to pay for the domain name of the said website. Under normal Indian Tax laws, these are perfectly acceptable uses for your earned money and infact are even deducted for the purpose of calculating taxable income from your business/service. The intentions of the Government are pretty clear. They want all this forex in Indian accounts but they dont want to give any leeway to Indians who are earning this money. A sad day in cyberspace for Indians indeed.

In compliance with Indian regulations, if you are selling products and services to customers globally, please review the following important information:

•       Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of    goods and services should be withdrawn to your bank account within 30 days.

•       While making the withdrawal please make sure you select the purpose code that best fits your business.

•       Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India.  This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.

•    If you would like to make purchases on any website that accepts PayPal, you can continue to use any credit card issued by a bank in India.

If you do use an Indian credit card to pay via Paypal it would actually mean double payment of commission to Paypal , once at time of receiving the forex and next time at the time of sending it since Paypal earns a lot through forex rates.

Its not Paypal’s fault though, its obvious the Indian Government and RBI had a larger role to play in this fiasco.

Every month your credit card statement comes with an insert with lots of offers. But do you realise that most of these so called ‘offers’ are selling you Chinese goods, smuggled grey market goods at prices greater than what the companies offer to regular customers.

You don’t! , let us take an example :

Please note we are not using any company name here, we will however be writing to a few companies to see their response.

This Credit Card company has tied up with one of the largest online retailers, but the prices quoted in exclusive offers to their customers is more than what normally one would have to pay:

We consider a 2GB quantum MP3 player, the cost for which is Rs.999 to all customers on the retailers website (shipping is free), but the exclusive offer for the credit card company’s customers is Rs.999 + Rs.200 shipping !

So the next time you feel tempted by an exclusive credit card offer that came with your statement, think again !

A lot of us aren’t aware that MTNL Delhi telephone bills can be paid online with credit cards, all you need to do is follow the steps :

1. Log onto http://billalert.mtnl.net.in/ (Note: If link is down, try again in 1-2 days, sometimes their server goes down) and click on register to register a user for you and your telephone number.

2. After creating your user, login and see the left hand side menu, click on add telephone.

3. Fill in your telephone number and CA number which is available on your bills.

4.Now whenever you login and click on unpaid bills , you should be able to see the currently unpaid bills and pay them via the pay button which takes you to an ICICI bank payment gateway. You can then pay via your VISA or MASTERCARD.

Now wasn’t that easy ? I personally have been using this method for the last 2 years and have only once faced a problem when i made the payment twice (my mistake ) , anyway the problem was taken care of by contacting the MTNL accounts dept. pretty easily.

Disclaimer : We do not endorse any payment method, post is for informational purpose only.