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Giving and Receiving

I love eBay. Jenny introduced me to the site almost two years ago, and I have fallen in love with it – especially this holiday season. For the first time in my life I was done with holiday shopping two weeks before Christmas.

While paying for some of my purchases with my PayPal account, though, I noticed that I had the choice to either pay with my AMEX card or to debit my bank account directly. If you check the eBay site, it gives you all the clues that they prefer to debit your bank account directly – presumably to avoid the high fees that AMEX charges. It works similarly to the way our private label accounts do with much lower transaction fees for the merchants than accepting P-Cards, but there is a key difference. Many of our private label clients offer their customers incentives to utilize a private label card over a P-Card.

If PayPal would have offered an incentive to me to debit my bank account, I probably would have chosen to debit my bank account. Because they didn’t, my AMEX rebate was the clear choice.

Certainly, reminding customers that they have the option to use a payment method that is cheaper to the merchant to accept is a no-brainer, but actually incentivizing customers to utilize the cheaper payment method is something that is easily overlooked. So this holiday season, remember, to pass on (at least some) of those savings. You’ll likely earn more in the long-run.

SIDENOTE: The Payment Puzzle Box will not have a post on Monday, December 28th. Multi Service customer service will run as usual through the holidays, and Jenny will return with her next post on Monday, January 4. In the meantime, Happy New Year!