One of the benefits of being a small company is that we can try new things with relatively little planning (i.e. meetings and committees and focus groups and…) and one of the further benefits is that when we find out things don’t work, we can nix it just as fast.

Five years ago, we changed from accepting orders and then seeking payment in any way you could get it here to only accepting orders with credit cards and requiring that you keep them on file. A small but vocal contingent really hated that, and some people just flat out refused to replace their credit cards and more or less kind of dared us to try and enforce the rule, so we didn’t - we instigated a “penalty” of sorts of $1.50 to cover the fact that folks were essentially thumbing their nose at us.

Some of them further thumbed their nose by paying every part of the invoice other than the fee.

OK, we get it.

DrakNet has completely done away with the manual payment fees, and we don’t require you to have a credit card on file, and we don’t require you to have a subscription for PayPal on file. You need to pay us by the deadline and if you don’t, we suspend your account, and 7 days later, we’ll delete it.

DrakNet accepts the following payments, and none incur any kind of fees:

1. Credit Cards on File - place a Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover Card on file and we will charge the card when your invoice is generated on the 25th of the month for monthly accounts, or 3 months before the day your package renews for annual and biennual accounts.
2. Manual PayPal Payments - you can email your payment to billing@drak.net and we will post it manually, or you can make a one time payment within your billing area after logging in that will post and credit immediately.
3. PayPal subscriptions - you can set up subscriptions for your packages within your billing area so that PayPal will auto-pay it, and it will automatically post.
4. Electronic Checks - Fill out the electronic check form as long as you are paying from a United States bank. (Please note that if you have insufficient funds, the payment will not be retried and the bounce will incur a $25 fee.)
5. Paper Checks - mail us a check as long as its drawn on a US Bank to our address and we’ll credit it. If you’re running late and don’t want to be suspended you can send an overnight to the same address with any shipping service as there is someone to accept the delivery and sign for it. Report it to us so we know it’s coming.
6. International Money Order - An international money order is very similar in many aspects to a regular money order except that it can be used to make payments abroad. With it, a buyer can easily pay a seller for goods or services if he or she resides in another country. International money orders are often issued by a buyer’s bank and bought in the currency that the seller accepts. Mail it the same way you would a paper check.
7. Wire Transfer - we only accept domestic and international wire transfers for amounts over $500. Contact us for information on sending a wire.

We have taken off all the alternative fees manually, and if we missed one, let us know.

Tags: alternative payment

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 12:39 am and is filed under DrakNet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.