ATTN: PayPal Payers - Fee Hike


FloatingFatMan

 

Posted

For those who pay their CoH sub with PayPal, you might want to read the following article.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009...e-fee-hike.ars

Quote:
In June, PayPal made a number of changes to its User Agreement and posted an update to the PayPal Blog. At that time, director of product marketing Heinz Waelchli wrote that PayPal had now begun allowing those with business and premium accounts to make personal transfers to friends and family for free. This, in itself, is a welcome update—I use my PayPal account to receive payments for items I sell on Etsy, but now I can send money to my brother from the same account without either of us having to give PayPal a cut.

What PayPal failed to do was inform users of the fact that any transfer having to do with goods or services will be charged the 3¢ + 2.9 percent fee no matter who or where it's coming from. This includes payments sent from personal accounts as well as payments made after someone has sent you a request for payment (even if that request has nothing to do with goods or services).

The change happened in June, but many of you may not yet have noticed the increase in fees, seeing as most of the Internet seems to have missed it until now...


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Posted

"coming from" is the key there. The person who gets the money owes PayPal a cut, similar to credit card processing fees, or buying vs. selling at the consignment houses. The buyer doesn't pay extra, the seller just gets less.

Paragon Studios, unless they've been gaming the system, is already a business user of PayPal and would have been paying these fees already. From their perspective, probably nothing changed.


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Posted

Indeed, PayPal has been skimming money off payments made for as long as it has existed. It's part of the business model. The sender of money doesn't see it happen, though. This doesn't seem like a change at all, to me. If you select Goods and Services as the reason you're sending money it always meant fees.

To avoid fees you always had to choose "Gift." I think the arstechnica article is just about wrong on almost every "change" it speaks of. Or my account has been a business account for as long as it has existed so the change wouldn't have been detectable.


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@Razoras

 

Posted

Last time I used my Credit Card to pay my COH sub...Visa flagged it as a suspicious activity and before I could say it wasnt they cancelled my card as compromised and reissued me a new one, which was a royal pain.

So I've been using Paypal since. Dont know if that issue would happen again if I went back to standard credit card, but I dont want to find out. So fees or not...I'll stick with Paypal payments.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Razoras View Post
Indeed, PayPal has been skimming money off payments made for as long as it has existed. It's part of the business model. The sender of money doesn't see it happen, though. This doesn't seem like a change at all, to me. If you select Goods and Services as the reason you're sending money it always meant fees.
pretty much every digital payment method has a fee. Even a creditcard has the anual sub and uses often more 'profitable' exchange rates. Then again, normal bank to other bank payments in most cases still take a day, a day both sides dont have the money. Gues who's getting the interest of that?

No, what really is bad.. the stupid US -> EU rate. I pay US servers for little 10 euro (probably less by now), while i get the full load still on the EU side. Same game, different server.. 3 euro a month.


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Razoras View Post
Indeed, PayPal has been skimming money off payments made for as long as it has existed. It's part of the business model.
Yes, it's the same with a credit card. When a purchase is made with a credit card, the store pays a fee/percentage as part of the deal with credit card companies. The consumer doesn't see this fee in the charges, but that doesn't mean the store didn't alter all of its prices when they decided to accept credit cards in the first place in order to balance it out. When NCSoft set the fees for CoH, they would have taken those percentages into account.

In the US if you go into a store and ask "debit or credit" and you reply with "it doesn't matter" or "whichever is easier," they will nearly always pick debit because debit cards don't charge the fee. (If they pick credit, it's likely an employee training issue.)


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by MissInformed View Post
Yes, it's the same with a credit card. When a purchase is made with a credit card, the store pays a fee/percentage as part of the deal with credit card companies. The consumer doesn't see this fee in the charges, but that doesn't mean the store didn't alter all of its prices when they decided to accept credit cards in the first place in order to balance it out. When NCSoft set the fees for CoH, they would have taken those percentages into account.

In the US if you go into a store and ask "debit or credit" and you reply with "it doesn't matter" or "whichever is easier," they will nearly always pick debit because debit cards don't charge the fee. (If they pick credit, it's likely an employee training issue.)
Now if only they were subject to the same oversight as banks and credit card companies...

</Bitter Ex-PayPal'er>



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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by MissInformed View Post
Yes, it's the same with a credit card. When a purchase is made with a credit card, the store pays a fee/percentage as part of the deal with credit card companies. The consumer doesn't see this fee in the charges, but that doesn't mean the store didn't alter all of its prices when they decided to accept credit cards in the first place in order to balance it out. When NCSoft set the fees for CoH, they would have taken those percentages into account.

In the US if you go into a store and ask "debit or credit" and you reply with "it doesn't matter" or "whichever is easier," they will nearly always pick debit because debit cards don't charge the fee. (If they pick credit, it's likely an employee training issue.)
I know where I work, if it's Visa or MC, it's something like a 2.5$ fee. Discover is 3-3.5%, and Amex is outrageous (which is why we don't do them, 5+%, I think). If we en up being charged on debit transactions, it's $0.50, never more. So we prefer debit (as we deal with hot tubs and pool tables, where the cheap end is 1,300, so those percents add up.) but we also charge a visa/mc/discover fee for payments over $500


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