So you may be wondering why our prefered payment method is via credit card?
Some people prefer to pay with Paypal and if you feel strongly about it or have other reasons to pay via paypal that is of course fine. We offer Paypal now as a result of meeting people's requests for us to accept Paypal. So we do.
Why do we prefer credit cards? This is purely for financial reasons. If it costs us more money to do business this affects our ability to keep out prices as they are, the higher our costs the higher the end cost to the customers. Please note - We do not individually pass on any of the transaction costs as many other companies do in life these days.
If only looking at transaction costs, then of course direct deposit is the cheapest to us, however this takes time in reconciling transactions, updating orders accordingly, following up with non-payments, also this leaves room for human error which ends up with us giving less than that the top quality customer service we aim to provide and processing of orders often takes longer with the extra admin involved. Further, occassionally customers do forget that they need to go and separately pay the direct deposit and become grumpy with our apparent slow service. This of we prefer to avoid for the sake of excellent customer service.
Paypal transactions are an automated form of payment where it is taken directly from your account straight away for us to access. This enables us to process the orders quickly once they are placed and payment clears automatically, however there are down sides to Paypal.
1. The transaction costs are high. Very high compared to the nonexistant direct deposit transactions and nearly double the transaction costs of Credit Card transactions.
2. The service can be unreliable. For payments via Paypal the final payment step of check out is through their system, not ours. This does not always work properly, often causing frustration for both us and you (our customers).
3. Lastly Paypal hangs onto the funds that you pay us with until we go in and manually transfer out the balance. This is again admin work that must be performed daily by us and reconciled. Further in Australia, once we have logged into Paypal and transferred out the balance it takes up to 5 working days for the funds to clear with us after you have paid and we have transferred the funds. This is not the case with other countries, it seems Paypal just wants to punish us Aussies! For our UK team and account the funds from Paypal clear within 2 hours of transferring them! Often only taking minutes if not instantaneously! Further the transaction costs are similar to those charged by the banks.
These are examples of why doing business in Australia is more expansive than many other countries around the world. However that is a different topic for another day.
With the focus of keeping our costs down whereever possible (for your benefit as well as our ability to function as a business) and the aim of providing a fast turn around on orders with top quality service - for the above reasons our preferred payment method is via credit cards pretty please.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask! We're always happy to answer any questions as best we possibly can :D