paying for orders with our pending payment balance

Discussion in 'Suggestions & Feedback' started by baltimore, Jul 27, 2016.

  1. baltimore
    baltimore Member
    When will Shapeways allow for us to use our pending payout balance for payments for our own orders? It'd save the ~3% transaction fee both ways, and since we're going back and forth with payments and purchased all month, the savings will add up.
     
  2. tebee
    tebee Well-Known Member
    An excellent idea - maybe they could let us Europeans pay in dollars too, thus saving the 3% cost of the currency conversion too
     
  3. 3401_deleted
    3401_deleted Well-Known Member
    This would be great, but I know this feature has been suggested five years ago and unfortunately nothing happened...
     
  4. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
    Interesting idea! I'll talk to our finance folks and see what the financial system details are. Most likely there's a good reason why it is how it is, but let's find out.
     
  5. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
    Ok so I talked to our wizards at the Finance team. From accounting / business operations point of view, there's nothing blocking this—which is great news. However on a system level this change is anything but trivial and requires a lot of planning. Given all the other things we have in the air and want to do next, it will take some time before we'd get to this. But like I said, it's a great idea and I'm going to keep it in my mind!
     
  6. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    A related topic that came up (years) before as well is an option to have shop markup payments by bank transfer instead of paypal. Any new thoughts on that ?
     
  7. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
    I'll take that question to our Finance team too. I'm suspecting there's certain liability issues that are simplified when we go with PayPal, for one, we don't store and handle your bank account information which is good for both of us. Also, I'm certain that from an operational point of view it's easier for us to give credit via PayPal (and their one API) than to issue bank transfers globally, with different banks and systems. Foreign transaction fees between banks are usually much higher than 3%
     
  8. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Selfish me was primarily thinking of the EU common market, where I believe bank transfers are much more the norm than in the US. (Also paypal seems to just have had a major glitch in Europe, where bank account information for a number of customers was suddenly invalidated leading to transactions failing or falling back to credit cards or other means of payment unexpectedly)
     
  9. stannum
    stannum Well-Known Member
    More the norm, and with a bit of hunting, you can get 0% transfers even between countries (which SW cashed in). As for APIs, only one needed, to talk to own bank.
     
  10. leonoudehand
    leonoudehand Active Member
    I think I asked the same question a couple of years ago. Believe most shop owners quite frequently place orders themselves (at least I do). Bit of a waste of money to send all those fees to PayPal..
     
  11. Armstrong3D
    Armstrong3D Active Member
    Definitely for that idea.
     
  12. baltimore
    baltimore Member
    Yea, We have been asking for years, in various versions of your feedback forum. I've been a member since 2009 and this topic always comes up and then is brushed aside for hey we'll do this one day in the future.
     
  13. Ngineer
    Ngineer Well-Known Member
    I totally agree!