Godaddy FX fees on domain sales

[Whois-Search]

Anyone else getting fed up with @godaddy charging excessive foreign exchange (FX) fees to convert USD to GBP?

As you may know @godaddy will only let you agree a price in dollars (USD). They do not support GBP when selling a name.

To convert USD in to other foreign currencies they seem to use a company called Tipalti. You will see a tiny link to their payee agreement on an e-check confirmation.

However in the @godaddy control panel you can see the conversion FX fees:

Here are three recent examples:

19/05/2024
Price Agreed: $3,700 USD
Amount paid out: £2,816 GBP

18/03/2024
Price Agreed: $45,000
Amount paid out: £34,570 GBP

13/12/2023
Price Agreed: $6,500 USD
Amount paid out: £5,006 GBP

Only if you use something like XE.com to convert USD at the exchange rate at the time can you see how much they are taking.

Note: On the most recent example I even tried to increase the USD sale price to get £3000 and they still took £184 extra, lost in FX conversion!

Some people (Godaddy?) will say why don’t you get paid in dollars? Simple answer to that one is we live in the United Kingdom and the company pays UK VAT.

Maybe when they attend the Domain Summit we can all persuade them to support selling names in GBP ?

 

[Helmuts]

.. interesting.. Maybe @godaddy can clarify this? Thank you.

 

[RB5]

Can this not be resolved through a combination of Wise accounts in multiple currencies and https://www.xero.com/uk/accounting-software/use-multiple-currencies/

You should be able to still handle VAT whilst receiving payments in USD (and the better rates of say Wise or Revolut etc).

 

[ukbackorder]

Yes I recommend using wise.com and setting up multiple currency accounts. You can do conversions yourself then at better rates. They also give you interest on your balances.

 

[Whois-Search]

Yes I use Wise.com for my other registrar business to keep dollars and euros. As most big registries are USD/EUR and we have to send thousands of dollars to Godaddy Registry etc It does make the bookkeeping more complicated but Xero does connect to Wise.

However for these Godaddy sales they go through Giraffe.co.uk and we like to keep things simple. It would be great if @godaddy could just support sales in GBP so we could agree mostly .uk sales in local currency.

 

[Whois-Search]

I finally got a reply from Godaddy:

You selected to be paid via local bank transfer which is subject to payment disbursement fees. There is a flat fee of $5 US deducted from the total payout amount for local bank transfers, so the amount in USD sent was $3695.00. After the FX fee the exchange rate to GBP was about 0.76. This resulted in the payout of £2816.02.

When you look at the current USD to GBP rate it is about 0.78 not 0.76

 

[getmein]

I've previously tried numerous workarounds over the last few years - USD account based in the US - account currency seemed to default to GBP. USD account based in the UK - again godaddy seems to want to default to GBP, which I imagine is tied to your location. Difficult for them to justify those FX rates in a world of Wise/Revolut except where it's just another hidden margin. Haven't tried recently so if you have any success pls update the thread.