[Coworking] Can we talk about bank fees?
I don't know about everyone else, but since I've opened a coworking office, one of the most mysterious and difficult-to-wrap-my-head-around concepts has been why the hell am I getting charged so much for accepting credit cards and where is it all going. In our scramble to get open in time, we signed on with First Data, Wells Fargo recommended them so what could go wrong? This month, we billed $1435 through first data, from that, we were charged a $48.55 bankcard discount fee, a $23.87 Bankcard interchange fee, and a 53.89 Bankcard Fee. First data is incredibly unhelpful, but I've managed to figure out that the discount fee is just what they charge us, the interchange fee is what the credit card charges us, but what the hell is the Bankcard fee? Also, most beguilingly of all, It's been slowly going down while our other two fees have been going up. I knew it would be a little pricy, but it seems absolutely insane that we're paying nearly 10% of our revenue out to these companies. It's going to cost us $500 to break the contract and I'm totally on board with doing it, but is there a much better solution? -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [Coworking] Can we talk about bank fees?
Oh wow, your fees are way too high. Kill that contract! Standard fees are closer to 2.9% + 25-30 cents per transaction. Even when you factor in all of the tools to work with a decent processor like Stripe or Braintree, the max you're gonna pay is 5%ish. Even PayPal (which sucks for lots of other reasons and I would not recommend using) is 2.9%. The biggest additional benefit to using Stripe is that your account is portable. It also manages recurring subscriptions and, when you get a bit bigger, plug into awesome business analytics tools like Baremetrics.io and FirstOfficer.io that are built JUST for stripe. For actually managing memberships and subscriptions, do some googling around for stripe membership subscriptions and see which option fits your needs. You can get things that are out of the box like Memberful, or things that are super duper customizable like GravityForms for Wordpress + the 3rd party Gravity Forms stripe plugin (that's what we do. It's not perfect but it gives us the control we wanted). Do some homework before choosing again, but you're DEFINITELY overpaying now! -Alex -- The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself. Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://listen.coworkingweekly.com On Tuesday, Dec 23, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Jensen Yancey jensen.yan...@gmail.com, wrote: I don't know about everyone else, but since I've opened a coworking office, one of the most mysterious and difficult-to-wrap-my-head-around concepts has been why the hell am I getting charged so much for accepting credit cards and where is it all going. In our scramble to get open in time, we signed on with First Data, Wells Fargo recommended them so what could go wrong? This month, we billed $1435 through first data, from that, we were charged a $48.55 bankcard discount fee, a $23.87 Bankcard interchange fee, and a 53.89 Bankcard Fee. First data is incredibly unhelpful, but I've managed to figure out that the discount fee is just what they charge us, the interchange fee is what the credit card charges us, but what the hell is the Bankcard fee? Also, most beguilingly of all, It's been slowly going down while our other two fees have been going up. I knew it would be a little pricy, but it seems absolutely insane that we're paying nearly 10% of our revenue out to these companies. It's going to cost us $500 to break the contract and I'm totally on board with doing it, but is there a much better solution? -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [Coworking] Can we talk about bank fees?
Yeah that seems high. On $1500 I'd expect $50-75 in fees. We currently use USAePay+ACCPC+CheckGateway and it's about 2.1%. When you process more and you've been around longer, the rates go down. Your services probably give you more then you are asking for... some funky feature they think warrants the added fees. They should at least throw in a Christmas turkey. But yes, it's all kinda crazy. The reason for it is that there are a lot of middle-men taking a cut along the way. I could dig in to the details but it would make your head spin even more. I'm currently exploring the idea of starting our own payment gateway where all the proceeds go towards coliving and coworking movements. If we can add a layer where our members are voting with their payments then we have a revenue stream, a communication channel, and direction. Combine this with something like Copass and things get really interesting really fast. If anyone is interested in exploring this with me, please let me know. But sorry Jensen none of this would be ready in time for your needs. Switch to stripe and move on. You'll recoup the $500 soon enough. Jacob On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Alex Hillman dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com wrote: Oh wow, your fees are way too high. Kill that contract! Standard fees are closer to 2.9% + 25-30 cents per transaction. Even when you factor in all of the tools to work with a decent processor like Stripe or Braintree, the max you're gonna pay is 5%ish. Even PayPal (which sucks for lots of other reasons and I would not recommend using) is 2.9%. The biggest additional benefit to using Stripe is that your account is portable. It also manages recurring subscriptions and, when you get a bit bigger, plug into awesome business analytics tools like Baremetrics.io and FirstOfficer.io that are built JUST for stripe. For actually managing memberships and subscriptions, do some googling around for stripe membership subscriptions and see which option fits your needs. You can get things that are out of the box like Memberful, or things that are super duper customizable like GravityForms for Wordpress + the 3rd party Gravity Forms stripe plugin (that's what we do. It's not perfect but it gives us the control we wanted). Do some homework before choosing again, but you're DEFINITELY overpaying now! -Alex -- *The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.* Join the list: http://coworkingweekly.com Listen to the podcast: http://listen.coworkingweekly.com On Tuesday, Dec 23, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Jensen Yancey jensen.yan...@gmail.com, wrote: I don't know about everyone else, but since I've opened a coworking office, one of the most mysterious and difficult-to-wrap-my-head-around concepts has been why the hell am I getting charged so much for accepting credit cards and where is it all going. In our scramble to get open in time, we signed on with First Data, Wells Fargo recommended them so what could go wrong? This month, we billed $1435 through first data, from that, we were charged a $48.55 bankcard discount fee, a $23.87 Bankcard interchange fee, and a 53.89 Bankcard Fee. First data is incredibly unhelpful, but I've managed to figure out that the discount fee is just what they charge us, the interchange fee is what the credit card charges us, but what the hell is the Bankcard fee? Also, most beguilingly of all, It's been slowly going down while our other two fees have been going up. I knew it would be a little pricy, but it seems absolutely insane that we're paying nearly 10% of our revenue out to these companies. It's going to cost us $500 to break the contract and I'm totally on board with doing it, but is there a much better solution? -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Coworking group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
