When it comes to hiring freelancers to help you write content and run a website, one area that is often overlooked is in how to pay the freelancer, and in what currency? It doesn’t seem as big a deal at first. But, choosing the wrong currency and payment system for freelancers and both yourself and the freelancer could be losing tens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars a year in currency conversions and fees. For this reason, from having to look at multiple different ways of paying freelancers, here is my take on how to best pay freelancers online.
Before starting, the currency of online work is dollars – don’t ask me why! But it is. So, with this, here are some of the best ways to pay freelancers in dollars.
If they Don’t Mind, PayPal
PayPal is, by far, the preferred option to pay a freelancer, in dollars too. Although PayPal don’t lead the way with currency conversions and fees for Product/Service payments, it is a payment system that everyone is accustom to online.
However, the problem with PayPal is in the currency conversion and fees. For example, if you give someone $100, how much does that cost you and the recipient? Did you have to send more than $100 and did they receive less than $100? Including currency conversions, the answer is usually yes.
This is why its good to find the cheapest way to pay freelancers. Either it can save you money, or can send freelancers more money, which might help with retention rate and quality of work.
International Bank Transfer
This is a base-by-base check, since different banks will charge different rates for:
- International payments
- Currency conversions
For example, in the UK, Natwest will be pretty poor for both 1) and 2). However, there are banks that are good for this, such as Monzo or Starling in the UK, that use the Mastercard exchange rate, with pennies for fees on international payments.
Payoneer
Payoneer is a better option, from my experience, than PayPal, for maintaining more of your cash for both yourself and the freelancers. The exchange rate they use is closer to the actual exchange rate than PayPal, and can offer withdrawals to a multitude of bank accounts in different countries, just like PayPal.
For this reason, if you can use Payoneer, I would highly recommend doing so. The problem then lies with convincing freelancers to move over to Payoneer. This is because most people online have a PayPal account, but not Payoneer.
This is not too large a problem, though – from a little education and explanation on how much you can both save, your freelancers should happily want to switch over, if its going mean they receive more of their hard earned cash than PayPal!
