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I've just ordered a new soldering station from a small company who only accept either bank transfer or cheque. There's nothing wrong with this as it will probably be cheaper that accepting cards an PayPal, but these days, it seems peculiar.
I was just wondering if anyone here still ends up buying things with cheques? I still use cheques for personal payments, and for paying bills etc, but I haven't bought anything with one for a long time.
I don't use a cheque.... i don't know, but maybe more then 10 years... I only use debit card,
and i pay all my bills on internet, or ATM. since a long time here that you can do all things in ATM like:
paying bills, put money on yout mobile phone, buiyng tickets etc...
I fond funny that, a so retarded country like mine (Portugal) in 1995 when i went to to england the ATM were still in mono color. We had colors, and very nice graphics by that time. Your ATM, was very basic, compared with ours.... of course the rest of the country was light years away...... except for ATMs, and food... lol
Funny you say that about the mono ATM.
The ATM at my local NatWest branch still has a green CRT. Its quite bright now. It used to be really dim, so I'm guessing they either replaced it, or brightened it up. Many of them do now either have colour CRTs/LCDs though.
I've no idea what OS the NatWest machines run. I've never seen them display errors or anything, but there are plenty of machines around that run Windows :unsure:.
Problem was, we had ATMs (we just call them cash points, or cash machines) that had been installed years ago, so they didn't want to spend money replacing them. Most are in full colour these days, but do sometimes still get monochrome ones in small places.
As for cheques, I can't remember when I last used one. I pay all bills online. My wife did however have to pay with one recently for something to do with our house damage.
I still have a cheque book just in case I need to use it. Banks were trying to cancel cheques completely last year, but older customers complained, so they keep them. Cheque guarantee cards have however been scrapped.
And there are also travel cheques. I used some when i was in Nottingham, Thomas Cook traveler cheques, or something like that...
Do any of you use PayPal to receive payments?
I just sold an item on ebay for £9.50 inc postage and it cost me 50p to receive the paypal payment. I also sold something last year which had a noticable paypal fee. Of course a cheque would have been free for me.
OK, I suppose 50p isn't much, but I bought an oscilloscope off ebay a while back for about £75, so that will probably have cost the seller a fair bit in fees.
I use Paypal for most online transactions, both buying, seller and paying for items and services on websites (not just eBay). And on Amibay most of our members use Paypal to conduct all transactions.
If you get the buyer to send you the money as a Gift payment you then don't get charged the fees. However Paypal gift payments do not cover the buyer with buyer protection, so if buying something worth some money to it better to send the money so fees are paid, then if the item never arrives or something is wrong with it when it does you are protected through Paypal and can open a dispute and get your money back.
I recently had to do this. I purchased a PS3 from someone. It arrived but had the YLOD error and was broken, whereas the seller had stated it was fully working. The seller refused to respond when confronted about this so I opened a Paypal dispute. They ruled in my favour and refunded me the full amount paid once the condition of returning the broken PS3 back to the seller was confirmed. So it is worth using Paypal for online transactions.
Equally if I'm buying a game through Steam, or purchasing something at an online store I normally look to see if they accept Paypal. If they don't I will often not buy from them and go elsewhere that does. The huge advantage of Paypal is that your personal details are only held by them and you do not give any payment details to the company you are buying from, just your Paypal account, so it is much more secure.
As for the fees Paypal charge. They are a company, and much like a virtual international bank. They charge the fees to make money and to keep running. Plus those fees go towards the services they offer, such as the buyer protection I've mentioned. It can sting a bit as a seller to lose a chunk of the money being sent to you in fees. For this reason, many people these days often ask the buyer to pay the fees, or work out what the fees would cost and add it to the price of the item to cover them.
For site donations made to both this site and Amibay we have to pay fees on the donations received. I will normally lose about 39-49p on a £10 donation in fees. Very annoying... So I would only receive £9.51 for a £10 donation. If any members wanted to gift donate please PM me to send the money directly and avoid losing the fee charges.
I carry a chequebook all the time, just in case the loo has run out of paper.