Beware Extra Fees On NOCHEX
This information might be of interest to merchants accepting Nochex as a payment option.
Nochex is a low cost payment system ideal for lower volume ecommerce vendors and ebay vendors, often used along side, or inplace of other cc processors or paypal
Nochex - sometimes talked about as the UK paypal - is starting to get complaints in the way that the ‘payement gateway’ processes credit card payments.
On Working Lunch today (BBC2) there were claims that credit card purchases using the Nochex service were treated as cash advances, and because of such they were subject to additional charges and much higher interest rates.
This can be a real pain if you are using the service for ‘micropayments’ - especially downloads, that may only cost the user £1, might cost nearly 5 times that with the addition of credit card fees.
Nochex have responded with the following warning on their payment pages.
Please be aware that a limited number of card issuers may charge you a cash advance fee for funding this transaction by credit card. This is not a charge made by Nochex.
This is accompanied with a link to a very short help article:
Cash Handling Fees
Some Visa and MasterCard issuers (including Capital One, GM, MBNA, Mint, Sainsbury’s and Tesco) may charge you a cash handling fee when using your credit card to fund a Nochex payment.If you are unsure whether you will be charged a cash handling fee we recommend that you either speak to your card issuer before you make the payment or choose an alternative card (such as your debit card) to make the payment from.
This fee is not charged by either the Merchant to whom you are sending this payment or by Nochex.
This is slightly worrying. I personally don’t use Nochex, but I do use PayPal alot. I am starting to wonder if there are similar issues with these other ‘Micropayment’ card payment processors?
If anyone knows the answers please post a comment!
