Long-time reader, first time registeree and poster, etc.
I have an American Express Business Accelerator card that I use for as many business purchases as possible.
This week one of my suppliers complained that they copped a 4% ish fee from Paypal which they use to process credit card payments for their services.
This had left them a few hundred dollars out of pocket compared to a normal EFT payment; and while I realise this is part and parcel of accepting credit card payments through PayPal and essentially down to their decision to accept credit card payments in this way, I want to keep them happy and I don't want to go on costing them 4% of their fees.
However, I'd like to keep using the AmEx Business Accelerator card to pay this suppliers' invoices (especially given that every dollar spent on PayPal pays out two Membership Rewards points.)
The supplier doesn't receive enough of their payments via credit card to justify getting a merchant account. They've investigated Stripe as an alternative to PayPal but their fees look slightly worse. And I don't want to switch out to a larger / different supplier as these guys are really good.
So, to my question: is anybody aware of a method that we can use so that we're able to pay the supplier's invoices using the Business Accelerator card, without the supplier copping a fee?
I appreciate that I may be asking something completely unanswerable here, but any additional angles to look at this situation would be greatly appreciated :)
I think this one is, at face value, unanswerable. There may be some creative alternative payment options out there, such as F’s suggestion on paying using another currency that you purchase using your Amex - but not a clean way of pushing through spend without fees.
If that were possible, many points hunters would be all over it and abuse any options to manufacture spend on cards very quickly. I was going to suggest Stripe but interesting that comes out more expensive than Paypal. They should also check they are set up with the most effective form of Paypal Business account for their purposes as I know there a few different options with different fee structures out there.
Paypal merchant fee is the same across the board no?
I use Stripe trough Fresbooks for invoicing and Amex fees are 3.5% + 30c per transaction.
My local coworking space has partnered with Stripe and they offer 50k free transactions for all new members (membership costing $30 pm) which is a nice way of saving a bit of money.
I've never come across a gift card that doesn't incur fees but i do use a few virtual credit card providers who charge 2.5 loading fee but this is only for Visa and Mastercard. Maybe there are ones that do take Amex...