Paypal and foreign currency

Just wanted to know thoughts on this, following on from my Canadian Madine post in latest acquisitions.

So I had $149 in my Paypal account (I'm UK based), and the Madine was for sale on Facebook from a Canadian based seller. The seller advertised that it was for sale in American dollars, and to pay in American dollars. It was a bit more than I had, so some pounds need to come out of my bank and be converted. When I went to pay I made sure the dollars were selected as my primary funding source, but when I got to the proceed with payment section it was telling me he'd receive it in Canadian dollars. Well I didn't want to lose money converting the entire amount from pounds to Canadian dollars, nor converting American dollars to Canadian dollars, so tried to change it. Neither me or him could select an option for him to receive in American dollars, so in the end I just paid with the American dollars as it was doing my nut. I would get a better American-Canadian rate than pound-Canadian anyway.

The money wasn't charged to me until several days later, and in that time the package was already on its way. But when I did get charged I saw the entire amount was taken from my bank and the $149 was still in my Paypal. Now I was pissed off. I emailed Paypal and got back what appeared to be a bot response of "here is our currency conversion policy". I eventually called them but got some runt in another country who was as helpful as chocolate fire guard.

Anyway, anyone know why my dollars weren't used? are they only used if I was buying something from a country that uses American dollars as their primary currency?

Not sure if the different currencies thing makes a difference but I do know that unless you are careful they have been taking funds from whatever card you have as default, even if you have cash in PayPal for at least a month. Very annoying

Could it be that you didn't have enough dollars in your account to cover the full amount?
So Paypal would have had to take from your dollar balance and then a credit card and then convert that remainder to dollars...if you follow.
Perhaps that was too complex for the website to handle?
Just a working idea...

Thought the same, maybe as it was a foreign currency transaction the entire payment had to come from one source using one exchange rate, rather than being split between a PayPal balance and a bank account?

I do admit it is complex situation, sorry to lumber anyone with reading through it. Just wanted to see if anyone has had a similar situation.

The reason I have dollars in my account is because I sell photos on several stock libraries, and as they are all based in the US, I selected to be paid in US dollars they sold in. This means I not only lose anything when converting, but I can buy from the US and not lose another chunk of money using pounds.

I keep it in Paypal specifically to buy MOCs from US sellers.