Retail Order Gateway Terms And Fees
Retail Order Reports Key Terms:
- Status: Credit card or Paypal processing status:
- Completed: Funds were collected or refunded (in the case of a charge-back).
- Pending: Order was placed, but we must manually review the order. It flagged our system as possible fraud. It will either be rejected, or marked
Completed at which time you will see two entries for this order. Once marked completed, it will be made and shipped at that time.
- Rejected: The order was rejected because it did not pass our fraud tests. We never made or shipped the product and you are not charged any
refund fees, or charge-back fees, but no income was generated on this order.
- Refunded: We were forced to issue a refund. Refund fees apply (see details below)
- Product Title: The title of your product.
- Qty: Quantity ordered of that product.
- Cost: The cost of producing the unit. We charge the customer for shipping and handling (instead of charging you), but we deduct the product item cost from your retail price.
- Gross: The total amount including shipping and handling. We pass on the shipping/handling charge to your customer. This way, you do not have to pay for it.
- Shipping/Handling: This is the amount we charged for shipping/handling. The customer can choose between Standard first class shipping, or Priority, or Express shipping methods.
- Tax: Because this is a retail order, we have to charge MN (Minnesota) sales tax for those orders where the address is in MN. We pay the state of MN.
This way, you do not have to collect sales tax for orders yourself. TrepStar.com is located in Minnesota.
- Refund Fee: Every merchant or shopping cart eCommerce system charges a refund/chargeback fee. More details below.
- Charge-back Fee: Every merchant or shopping cart eCommerce system charges a refund/chargeback fee. More details below.
- Process Fee: Visa, MC, Amex, PayPal all charge fees to take credit card purchases. More details below.
- Address Correction Fee: If the customer submits a bad address, postage may fail to print. We charge a small fee to fix it if we can (more details below):
- Net: The order proceeds. This is the amount we owe you. We pass shipping/handling costs to the customer so they are paying for most of the fulfillment costs.
You receive the retail amount minus item cost. We subtract processing, refund, or address correct fees as well.
Refunds and other Fees:
-
Refunded: You may see a report transaction showing a status of 'Refunded'. This occurs when a customer forces us to refund their money.
Our policy is to give the customer a refund in these cases:
- Refused: The post office returned the package unopened AND the customer requested a refund.
- Customer asks us for a refund: If they still have the package, we require them to send the package back to us at their expense unopened.
This prevents a lot of refunds because they tend to forget or ignore this request.
- On occasion, our merchant provider will force us to give a refund regardless if the customer sends the package back to us or not.
When a package is refunded, we have to deduct the full amount of the refund. We act on your behalf and attempt to refund just the retail product price but
sometimes Visa/Mastercard/Amex force us to refund the entire order amount including shipping/handling. This is a cost you would incur if you collected retail funds yourself.
We are forced to pass this cost to you. It's a normal cost of doing business.
- Refund Fee: In addition to charging your account the amount of the refund (since that money is deducted from our account), we also charge a
$15.00 refund fee for handling this situation. We attempt to refund only the retail price, not
shipping and handling. Most merchant services charge a $25.00 fee to handle refunds.
Click for Shopping Cart Pricing Comparison
- Charge-back Fee: In addition to charging your account the amount of the purchase (the refunded amount), we also pass on the charge-back fee
we are charged from our merchant (you would pay this fee regardless if you used TrepStar, or did it yourself).
This $25.00 charge-back fee for handling this situation and passing on the fees we are charged.
Most merchant services charge a $25.00 -$35.00 charge-back fee. Charge-backs are fairly rare, and different from refunds because refunds are usually valid
customers who did purchase and just decided they want a refund. A charge-back is usually a purchase with a stolen credit card. The customer gets a bill and
dispute that fraud with their bank. When collecting credit card information, we use address verification, and the customer must enter the code on the back of the
credit card. These steps help reduce fraud.
Click for Shopping Cart Pricing Comparison
- Address Correction Fee: Customers sometimes type in bad, or partially incorrect shipping addresses. At times, this will cause postage printing to fail.
In this case, we have to fix the address before postage is printed correctly. Sometimes, we can see the customer just typed something wrong, or we know how to edit
and fix the address. If we're not sure, we email the customer for you (they gave their email during ordering) and ask their help to correct the address.
We then respond to that email and adjust the address so postage prints correctly. We may have to try this several times to get it to work.
This is very manual and time consuming. We do this for a small fee ($1.50). Consider this: Most of our competition
simply fails to ship the item (or notify you) and you never know until the customer complains 3 weeks later. Then, you have to figure out what when wrong,
and order again (full cost wholesale order) with the correct address. It may take as much as 15 minutes or more for our employees to handle this from start to
finish which is at least $10.00 in costs to us.
- Process Fee: We charge a simple flat 5.0% transaction fee for the retail amount collected to cover our own internal costs.
For example, if you charge $20.00 for your product, we charge 5.0% which is $1.00 in this example.
If you used your own cart and merchant service, they charge a base transaction
fee of about $0.40 + 3.5% PLUS high monthly fees. Thus, on a $20.00 item, they would charge you $0.40 + $0.70 = $1.10 which is more than we charge.
Click for Shopping Cart Pricing Comparison
- Monthly Fee: We charge a small $5.00 monthly fee if you use our retail order purchase process.
The only reason we charge any fee at all is to avoid having a lot of
small accounts payable amounts sitting around indefinitely. In addition, unlike most shopping carts that charge you monthly fees regardless of account activity,
we only deduct this fee if you have a positive retail account balance. Most shopping carts charge you between $30.00 and $100.00 per month
PLUS you have to sign up for lengthy merchant account contracts (several years) of $50.00 or more per month. We charge this fee during your first month of use, then again on or near
the first of each month.
Click for Shopping Cart Pricing Comparison
Publisher Payments:
- We pay you (the publisher) via PayPal. You must edit your publisher settings and specify your PayPal email address. PayPal is the ONLY way we pay you.
This reduces fraud, which in turn keeps all of our costs as low as possible. There is absolutely no exception to this rule.
- Login to your TrepStar account and click the 'Withdraw' button (will only be displayed if you have any retail orders). You may request your funds once per month (30 days).
We will then transfer the net amount to your PayPal account.
- We temporarily hold payments for orders processed within 60 days. For example, if someone ordered today, we can not pay you the net
proceeds for 60 days. Customers that buy your product can request refunds as long as 60 days (or more) from the date of purchase. We require a wait time to help prevent fraud.
This helps us manage refunds and charge-backs so we don't get stuck with the bill. Once you've established a credit history with us, we may reduce the wait time for you upon request.
In invoice terminology, this is commonly thought of as '60 days net'.
- You will not be paid if you have a wholesale order account balance. We can't blend funds from retail to wholesale for accounting, billing, reporting/reconciling reasons.
You have to pay your wholesale account balance first, then your retail order funds can be available if you reach the minimum payment amount.
- Our minimum payment is $50.00. You can request a payment once every 30 days as long as your net
proceeds exceed $50.00. Most eCommerce/shopping carts charge monthly usage fees of $30.00-$100.00 or more plus
long term merchant contracts and fees of $45.00 per month or more for several years. If your TrepStar retail account balance
does not reach the minimum payment amount, no payment will be made (so consider that a usage fee).
Click for Shopping Cart Pricing Comparison
- Remember, you would be charged $150.00 or more per month if you set up your own eCommerce system
and shopping cart from someone else (e.g. www.1ShoppingCart.com). The TrepStar purchase page is very low cost alternative.
