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Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

squareup.com

61–70 of 176 posts

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#61
post #8

Does anyone know if the "real big" merchants like Walmart have to pay the fee? I assume they're so large they can sit on the processors and squeeze them (I know Costco does, they pay 0% fees in-store because Visa is so hungry to be their processor).

Interchange is refunded but settlement fees aren’t. Settlement is 25Bps or lower.

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#62
post #47
post #32

I guess the days when refunds were frictionless so that consumers could purchase with confidence are gone? Refunds have always been a cost of doing business - it just seems the processors / card companies want to change the rules and have their cake and eat it now that cash is mostly dead.

Refunds are still frictionless for consumers. It's vendors who have to maintain product quality and prevent fraud to avoid returns. It's not Square's job to make sure that a vendor's product is high-quality or that customers really want to keep the products they buy. Credit cards mostly work the same way. https://www.cardfellow.com/blog/credit-card-refund-fees

To be fair, sometimes people return stuff for arbitrary reasons like changing their mind.

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses will increase costs to cover it, just like they do now.

How will that help in the scenario the GP described? The businesses would still have to refund those higher charges.

I think the scenario is that in the case of normal purchases, your profits need to be higher to cover these fees on any returns.

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#64

This will affect businesses that do 3rd party merchant services, like events. If the event is cancelled, refunds are issued. Who pays that fee? It would be up to the business to try to claw back funds from the promoter of the event... who is now bankrupt from not being able to do their event. It gets ugly fast.

I'd think they'd just amend insurance policies to include the potential 3% revenue loss.

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course, it is always negotiable. Sweet. How do I negotiate with Amazon again? In reality, negotiation is a relic of a long gone era and flea markets. Buyer agency in general has mostly disappeared in modern transactions.

"negotiation is a relic of a long gone era and flea markets" So how did you determine salary last time you were hired? (I last negotiated a price in a retail store about 10 years ago - if you call that a long gone era then I feel rather old).

They throw out a number based off my last salary, and said it was non-negotiable. Because I needed a job, I had no option of backing out. The time before that, I tried negotiating, and the hiring director basically said "I know what you made at your last place, so you'll get that."

Even vacation has been non-negotiable. It's disheartening, but typical for tech (and ironically largely enabled by tech).

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses will increase costs to cover it, just like they do now.

How will that help in the scenario the GP described? The businesses would still have to refund those higher charges.

Everyone pays more for everything the retailer sells until their revenue and costs ratios match roughly as they did before, with variation depending on competition intensity and elasticity of the products sold.

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses will increase costs to cover it, just like they do now.

How will that help in the scenario the GP described? The businesses would still have to refund those higher charges.

Everyone else that bought something at the higher prices covers the fees when the much smaller number of people request the refund. So it is essentially crowd funded

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#68

This will affect businesses that do 3rd party merchant services, like events. If the event is cancelled, refunds are issued. Who pays that fee? It would be up to the business to try to claw back funds from the promoter of the event... who is now bankrupt from not being able to do their event. It gets ugly fast.

I'd think they'd just amend insurance policies to include the potential 3% revenue loss.

Who is 'they' in your equation here? Also, tell me how a small merchant services business is going to get an insurance plan that covers something like that? This isn't 3% revenue on one single event, it could be on a number of events. What if a multi-event promoter goes out of business?

This also isn't just events, that is only one example. Any 3rd party merchant service provider is going to be affected.

Back when I had my events company, we went with WePay because they were the only service at the time that offered 'free' refunds. Eventually, it became the norm. Now it seems like this policy is getting reverted and that's going to have a large impact on merchant service providers.

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#69
post #6

This is now pretty standard across the industry. PayPal made the same change last year.

Sadly users still expect refunds for any reason. Charging a 3% fee on a refund is a cause for a shtfit.

I wonder how consumers developed that expectation? I don't think that expectation is actually more than 20 years old...

Re: Square to no longer return processing fees when buyers are issued a refund

#70
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course, it is always negotiable. Sweet. How do I negotiate with Amazon again? In reality, negotiation is a relic of a long gone era and flea markets. Buyer agency in general has mostly disappeared in modern transactions.

This isn't true in payments. There are many reseller orgs, indie processors, etc. that are happy to negotiate heavily based on volume etc. Source: I was director of digital marketing for a payments company a few years ago.

That sounds like the usual "big businesses get extra considerations that small businesses do not". And since small businesses are the vast majority in number, negotiation is absolutely not something they can rely upon.

Or, to put another way, someone selling handmade goods at a fair using Square will never have more negotiation power than "if you don't like it, leave".

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