As of August 2 Pay Pal has increased their transaction fees that affects virtually every small business, and Christmas Lights Creations is no exception. We strongly disagree with their decision to raise fees, but we do prefer Pay Pal over our credit card processor Stripe. As such, while we don’t like having to pay higher fees we can live with them knowing Pay Pal does a much better job of protecting us against fraud, bogus customer claims and they get our money to us much faster.
We will not raise our retail prices to offset these higher transaction fees. However, we did have to raise the free shipping threshold from $135 to $150. You might wonder what the cost of shipping has to do with transaction fees, and that’s a good question. The answer is for every free shipping order we are, in affect, giving you a discount, meaning if you want that discount you will have to spend more to get it. Since we’re having to pay more for the transaction fee, we have to increase the threshold to help us recover those costs.
In July we published two articles regarding UPS raising their fees and the global increase in transportation costs, both of which forced us to raise our retail prices on average $1 per product. We don’t consider that increase prohibitive and we’re very confident that our retail prices remain competitive. We don’t like having to raise prices or the free shipping threshold, but we aren’t being given a choice. When UPS, transportation companies and Pay Pal raise their prices and fees, we have to pass those along like every other retailer.
And to be clear we have never steered a customer to paying for an order using our credit card processor or Pay Pal, and we never will. Customers are welcome to use whichever payment method they are comfortable with and we’re glad to have your business.
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