Saturday, April 25, 2015

GoFundMe Almost Triples Paypal's Charge

I was looking into contributing to a GoFundMe project when I happened upon their terms and conditions page. GoFundMe almost triples Paypal's charge for transferring money. From GoFundMe's terms and conditions page:
"GoFundMe charges a flat fee of 5% on all payments collected.
. . .
"In addition to GoFundMe's 5% fee, users are also agreeing to one of the following fees, along with the linked Terms & Conditions found below, based on the user's selection during the GoFundMe sign-up process. Only one (1) of the fees described below will be applied per GoFundMe campaign - not a combination thereof:

"US Users ONLY: WePay charges a fee of 2.9% AND $0.30 per donation. Read WePay's Terms & Conditions."
Note the 5% flat fee for GoFundMe and the 2.9% plus $0.30 fee for WePay. So for one transaction you pay GoFundMe coming and WePay going. Heh. There's a sucker born every minute.

Paypal charges only GoFundMe's lesser fee:
"Sales within the US 2.9% + $0.30"
Also, Paypal charges no fees for transferring money to family or friends as gifts.

But GoFundMe charges 5% more than Paypal for merely collecting the funds.

Nice work if you can get 5% just for receiving and holding funds with no responsibility for paying them out. Banks might want to look into that business model for the savings accounts they offer.


2 comments:

MAX Redline said...

Interesting observations, TD. I've never trusted any of the money transfer sites because there's usually a catch somewhere in there.

The fine print makes it all perfectly legal.

T. D. said...

You're right people don't pay attention. They just assume without doing due diligence.

It also shows why Paypal is so big. It offers a needed service at a reasonable price.

Western Union does the same. I send money transfers via Western Union to one dicey place a few times a year, and they always get through with no skimming. In fact the banking structure in the country was in chaos for about two months. I alerted Western Union, and they changed the status to always available (it usually goes on hold if not picked up within a certain time period), and when things settled down, my friend picked up his money transfer no problem.