Options for Bank Transfer Payments for Online Store? Especially for Europeans...

optimusgrime

Hi Guys,

Our online store sells a lot to the UK, EU and worldwide so PayPal fees are killing us (international payment surcharge + crazy conversion rates to transfer back to Euro when the payment is in USD and GBP on top of their high fees)

We were planning to just introduce a PayPal surcharge to try and offset this and to encourage more people to pay via Credit/Debit cards.

This is fine for most people as they have a debit/credit card, but further research suggests a lot of our European customers don't. The Germans in particular have a very low credit card user rate and their debit cards don't work for online shopping (except via some sites in Germany). They use PayPal to buy from us, funded through their bank accounts.

What we're looking at is options for bank transfer payments, for those European customers that don't have cards or dont' want to use them and don't want to get hit by a PayPal surcharge.

What we need is a system that guarantees the payment once made, PayPal allow bank transfers but have a high rate of it not going through, after you have shipped out the goods!

I found these Sofort guys: https://www.payment-network.com/deb_com_en

They seem to be the biggest company in Germany for this and also work with UK and a few other countries banks. Their system seems simple enough to use, no registration etc and the payment is much more likely to go through than with PayPal bank transfers.

They average about 1 in 5000 payments not going through which is more than good enough and their fees seem better than even credit/debit card rates:

https://www.payment-network.com/deb_com_en/merchantarea/fees

I was just wondering if any of you knew of any similar companies doing the same, there sadly does not seem to be a Europe wide system yet. It would be great if there was, I'd certainly take those total rates vs PayPal's:)

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks

TheCostumeShop.ie: Ronan

Just a quick suggestion, rather than surcharge for paypal, consider discounting for using credit / laser. People hate sneaky surcharges.

mneylon

If you're doing enough transactions you can get a lower rate from Paypal, though I think you have to ask them for it ie. it's not automatic

optimusgrime

Thanks for the replies guys, much appreciated.

It's not really the standard fees from PayPal that are the issue even though even at their slightly reduced rate they are still about double the credit/debit card fees when including the €0.35 transaction charge. It's the extras such as the cross border fee of 0.5%+ that's added. Worse still when you accept USD or GBP payments directly, you are forced to convert them back to EUR even though we have GBP and USD bank accounts to withdraw to. They say their exchange rate has a 2.5% margin but it's closer to 5%. So for someone buying from the US for example, you are looking at a minimum rate of about 3.5% + €0.35 per transaction. Then loosing about 5%+ to convert it to Euro. All our transactions are low priced so the transaction fees really add up also.

Ronan, I completely agree with you on the discount vs surcharge. The main problem is that we sell at one standard price that people are aware of, so if we go adding on x% it won't work too well. Similarly if we were to increase the delivery price (which most people are aware of also) it will probably put off potential customers as the price will appear higher and they may not go as far as the point on the checkout where they can get a discount.

My thoughts on it were to be as up front as possible and explain why there is a surcharge: it's costing 10%+ per transaction extra using PayPal, so it seems fairer to ask people who want to use it, especially those who have a credit/debit card which they could use instead, to contribute towards this as opposed to raising the price for everyone or stopping offering it altogether.

With the bank transfer option for countries with low Credit/Debit card use, I wanted to have it so everybody would have a no fees option available to them or the option to use PayPal if they really wanted to, at slight surcharge.

But I'm not sure if people will see it that way?

The Guvnor

This site may help:
http://www.webpayments.ie/

I cannot remember what the Germans mainly use - elv?

The Guvnor

Memory was accurate - http://www.six-card-solutions.com/EN/Merchants/E-Payment/Means-of-payment/Pages/ELV.aspx

It has to be possible to get these options for your customers but at what cost?

If you make some progress do please update us.

Blackjack

This isn't up and running yet but it's from an Organisation that nearly every European Bank is connected to in one way or another.

http://www.mybankpayments.eu/

I reckon it's going to offer a serious challenge to Paypal for European Onlin payments when its up and running.