Quote:
Originally Posted by Connallmac
If they are tacking on a fee to accept a Visa or Mastercard transaction directly they are in violation of their agreements with said credit card companies. Call or write Visa/MC and complain
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Complaining is only worth doing when the company is clearly trying to make a quick buck at the expense of the consumer. This is not the case (in this particular instance) with fictionwise/BoB.
They don't tack on a charge when you're buying over $5 in one go. The charge is only for small transactions which would otherwise likely end up costing them more money for the transaction than you're actually paying for the book.
Brick and mortar stores have the same issue to face, which is why many in the UK will refuse to accept visa/mastercard for transactions below £2.5 which used to be roughly $5, now just short of $4. As the poster above points out, they have the option to accept cash instead.
By all means lodge a complaint, but fictionwise/BoB are not out to rip you off (in this particular case) they're just ensuring that the tiny income from short stories is above the cost of the transaction. Otherwise they'd be losing money with every purchase and that's bad business so the next change they'd make would be to stop selling those items or impose a minimum transaction amount of $5.
In both of those cases the consumer would lose out if they just wanted to buy a single 50c short story.
Instead fictionwise offer you the item with a small extra charge, OR for customers that will buy one or two short stories on a regular basis, they offer the option to pay $5 (or more) in one go and then use that to pay (micro-transactions) over the coming weeks/months and they'll eat the transaction fee as required by the CC companies.
IMO the retailer is handling this situation as fairly as they can.
One thing I will say though. The extra charge should be mentioned on their website and certainly should appear before you've gone through with your purchase allowing you the option to back out if you don't want to pay it. If that isn't the case, then that is imo worth complaining about.