Debit Card Con by Plus net

[#1]

As I think I've mentioned before it's worth considering the advantages of using direct debit and especially the direct debit guarantee:
http://www.bacs.co.uk/Bacs/Consumers/DirectDebit/Pages/DirectDebitGuarantee.aspx

[#2]

Ah so it does not cost £1.50 for one off payments but it does for regular payments. Funny I thought banks charged the same no matter what the purchases. I think this proves yet again the £1.50 is a rip off.

Quote from: Bob

Quote from: mssystems Where does this leave new sign ups?  The DD validation process can be painfully slow.  I am in the habit of telling my referrals (mainly businesses) to put the first month on CC, which avoids delaying the delivery of my service.  Are we basically saying that I need to add £1.50 onto the other costs hidden behind the PN sign up process? No. You will still be able to pay the initial subscription by card and it *wont* be subject to the £1.50 processing fee.

[#3]

Whilst I'm certain that Plusnet wouldn't behave this way nobody who followed the Pipex/Tiscali fiasco on Thinkbroadband would have any doubts that paying by DD is the safest option.
Tiscali appeared to be taking money at will from peoples accounts when people had migrated over a year before - people then found that stopping a CCA could only be done by the payee and getting their money back was nearly impossible.
Play safe - Pay DD 

[#4]

Discsussing the above a while ago the penny dropped. Who going to pay for all the expensive advertising? Excisting customers of course. Bung a few quid on here and there, remove things like inclusive international phone calls and it goes a long way to pay for all the expensive TV adverts.

[#5]

Quote from: glloyd

Ah so it does not cost £1.50 for one off payments but it does for regular payments. Funny I thought banks charged the same no matter what the purchases. I think this proves yet again the £1.50 is a rip off.

No it doesn't. For one off payments the admin costs are much lower, e.g. if it's for the postage for a router and the payment fails Plusnet don't send the router if the payment fails, the user is aware immediately and will sort ot the problem and attempt the payment again. If it's a regular payment Plusnet have to do all the debt chasing and take steps to restrict the service, then when the payment is made restore the service.

[#6]

Booking fees wind me up more. You can usual avoid card fees but booking fees you can't

[#7]

Quote

Play safe - Pay DD

Nadger, BACS should employ you to write slogans for them

[#8]

I went to the garage a while ago because I needed petrol in my bike, so I stuck in a fiver but didn't have cash so pulled out my trusty Visa debit card.  The guy behind the counter refused to take it because I was spending less than £10 so I had to buy something in a garage worth £5 just to use my card!  The local Spar store won't accept card payments for anything less than £10, there are many examples out there of cards being rejected because the customer isn't spending enough to justify the cost.  Large companies like Tesco will absorb the cost to get customer loyalty and they make so much profit that they can, smaller companies cannot absorb the cost so the question should be, why should those of us on Direct Debit in effect pay more for our phone/broadband than people paying by card?  We are paying phone+broadband, you are paying phone+broadband-processing fee, so the rest of us appear to be subsidising you!

[#9]

sadly, most of you are missing the key argument i raised. No one is objecting to a dc fee, but to charge 1.50, which is totally extortianate, that was the key argument and it is supooported by Lloyds Nat west and Barclays.
The appropriate fee should have been between 18 and 20p.
No one would have objected to that.

[#10]

At a typical hourly cost of about £50 including all overheads that is less then 15 secs.
Get real - even £1.50 is under 2 minutes
Do you know how much your bank charges for sending one letter for exceeding the over draft limit - typically £20
The excess failure rate has already been stated to be over 10% and if the bank costings of £20 per transgression are used then that is equivalent to £2 per customer based on the10% nominal figure

Quote from: Bob

Let's look at it another way then. The failure rate of card payers *far* exceeds that of our Direct Debit payers. The transaction failure rate for Direct Debit averages about 1.5%. The failure rate of card transactions is about 12%. I needed tell you that repeat transactions cost us more money. Card payments are 8 times more likely to fail than DD payments - you can sympathise with PN for preferring DD!

[#11]

I would like to see proof that Lloyds TSB, Natwest and Barclays support the argument that these fees are extortionate.
If the appropriate fee should have been between 18-20p could you please show how these costs are made up. Direct charges by the merchant, staff time, VAT etc.
I don't think it would matter what the amount was, someone would have objected.

[#12]

Don't hold your breath Spider

[#13]

Being an arthropod I can't 

[#14]

Quote from: Spider

I don't think it would matter what the amount was, someone would have objected.

Agreed - had it been 18p - 20p I'd have objected to the charge being too small 

[#15]

I suppose this time is a step forward, he's given us the source. But if that was an answer he actually got it depends on the question he asked. Was it (a) how much do banks charge for card transactions? or (b) what is the average cost per transaction of card payments taking in to account the banks fee and the processes associated with failed transactions?
If the question asked was (b) I'd recommend that Plusnet should subcontract out the card processing to one of the banks that gave that answer!