PayPal is a sad story. I do not know of a cost effective way to get your paypal funds in South Africa. I have a ClickBank merchant account. So what I do when I have funds in my PayPal account is to buy something from myself at Clickbank and then wait for Clickbank to send me a cheque. I loose money on the transaction and it cost me R140 to bank the cheque, but I guess that is better than getting nothing at all.
I think the Clickbank merchant account now cost something like $49 but it is a once off fee. I open my first merchant account in 1999, it was also $49 then, paid my money and never paid anything again. So if you receive a lot of PayPal money it is worth going this route and of course you can also use your Clickbank account to sell other things like eBooks, etc.
For a clickbank merchant account see
http://www.in2im.com/clickbank and click the "sell product" at the top of the page.
Many people ask me this, so I might also add the following. I also opened my PayPal account in 1999. At the time we could still get a full functional account except for withdrawing money. I think they have not realized it but I can still accept payments and I can send payments. Apparently new RSA accounts cannot use it to sell things.
