Hi,
To avoid these charges, we recommend the option to pay via NEFT with zero transaction charges as our primary option and that’s what we recommend most of our future owners to use. Reason why we also provide a sufficient window for you to confirm the order and complete the final payment.
The directive quoted was about POS transactions using debit cards. The payment gateways continue to levy these charges for online transaction. Instead of putting it under the garb of transaction fee, we chose to mention it upfront. Or we could have added it to the vehicle pricing but that would be unfair for consumers who choose loan, lease or NEFT as their payment option (and hence do not incur this cost) and that’s something we chose not to.
I am glad that Ather is keeping this seperate so that cash buyers don’t needlessly get impacted.
Anyone who runs an online business that processes cards know how hard this choice is, do you increase the price for everyone or just absorb the loss?
Card companies have strong armed merchants with Terms and conditions that disallowed charging additional processing fee for card customers. But in the modern world this percentage based fee is impractical and not based on logic, only greed.
Thank you @Ather.Team for keeping the pricing fair and transparent.
Anyone who wants to use a card should not expect cash buyers to subsidize your preference.
If you still have a problem, please contact your card provider and ask them to stop charging the merchants exorbitant “Processing Fees”, Ather will gladly drop it then.
Simple as that. [Not really, since payment gateway providers take a cut too but I am exaggerating to make a point]
I appreciate Ather for showing a breakup of the charges and making sure that we pay a single amount. Merchants and businesses have to pay a flat fee + percentage usually.
On the other hand, either Ather includes it for everyone and doesn’t mention the charges or they are specifically showing the charges where it’s applicable and that’s really good.
Look at any of the other e-commerce players like Amazon/Flipkart, they’ve reached a scale where they can get better deals with Banks, but that stops around 1.6% as well. Further, going for a cheaper payment gateway might cause a lot more transaction failures which completely ruins the experience.
If you buy an automobile today and pay at the showroom, who’s footing the charge? The dealership. Where do they get the margin from? The markup on your vehicle. This isnt happening with Ather since they sell direct.
Hope this helps.