Introduction of payment method fees and abolition of minimum payment amounts

With „paydirekt“ and „Sofort-Überweisung“ now available as additional payment methods, we are also making further adjustments to payment procedures in general, effective from 1st December 2017. Until now, any fees related to payments via PayPal and other payment providers were covered by mailbox.org. In order to keep fees low, a minimum payment amount was necessary. In the future, we will no longer cover external fees but make them fully transparent to our customers. At the same time, this will enable us to abolish the previously required minimum payment.

For any previous payments, 12 EUR were required as a minimum amount per transaction. The fees charged by payment providers for paying with PayPal or Bitcoin were covered by ourselves so far. We have recently introduced two more payment methods to our portfolio, „paydirekt“ and „Sofort-Überweisung“, which also charge fees for their services. As a result, we are facing a situation of rising fee costs for our business. There has also been an issue with the minimum payment amount required, which was unpopular with some of our customers. While our support team did their best to make people aware, many customers did not realise that each of their transactions cost us about 0,35 Euro in fees.

We therefore decided to make transparent all payment provider fees and pass these on directly to our users effective from 1st Dezember 2017.

Any fees incurred by using PayPal, Bitpay, paydirekt or Sofort-Überweisung will be passed on to our customers from now on. Depending on the service provider chosen, a transaction over, say, 12 EUR will incur additional fees between 0,12 EUR und 0,58 EUR.

Find more details in our FAQ:
→ Transparency: How are external payment provider fees calculated?

Other payment methods that do not incur any fees remain available as usual, of course. These include normal bank transfer and standing order, paying cash into our bank account, and cash by mail (EURO currency only / no cheques).

The changes described above enable us to abolish the previously required minimum amount per transaction, as customers are now responsible for their own fees. Any new customers can now also pay lower amounts while they are trying out the service. Existing customers will be largely unaffected by the changes as most use payment methods that do not incur any fees. If you are an existing customer currently paying through PayPal or any other fee-charging service provider, we would encourage you to switch to a free payment method to avoid payment fees in the future.

We apologise for any inconvenience this causes and thank you for your understanding.
Your mailbox.org team.