Post by Keiwan in the new fees (Paypal mass payment suggestion)

Viewing post in the new fees (Paypal mass payment suggestion)

I agree that on average your payouts are definitely faster than most other platforms (I only experienced one very long and annoying delay when you were figuring out the whole tax stuff), but overall payout times are not really a problem at all.

The part that is just unacceptable is retroactively applying payout fees after specifically stating multiple times that payouts have no fees associated with them. Just to be clear about this, I'm not talking about adjustments because of fraud or refunds. Those make perfect sense. It's also not about having to pay a payout fee at all if one exists (I understand that it's PayPal who's charging the fee). It's about having trustworthy terms of service.

You cannot simply change your rules and fees and then retroactively apply them as if they had always existed (for the sellers - it doesn't matter if they already existed for you). All you're doing is making your site look less trustworthy. Again, I couldn't care less about the extra PayPal fee, since I can always readjust the revenue sharing slider to stay at an overall revenue loss of roughly 30% (payment processing fees + now payout fees + itch.io cut + PayPal currency conversion fees and lower rates).

I think you made a mistake here, not by introducing the new fees but by retroactively applying them. I really hope you guys can figure out ways for how to reduce these fees (e.g. talk to PayPal about payout fees, look into direct bank payouts at proper conversion rates...). I would love it if you were the ones to receive the 30% cut instead of PayPal but given the current amount of fees that are just passed onto the sellers that is not even close to being realistic at the moment.

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leafoAdmin5 years ago(+1)

Thanks for replying. Can you tell us where we said all payouts are free? Our TOS says that payment processor fees will be passed onto account holders. We've been running a balance for all accounts, but our payout system didn't have the functionality to include debits until this update. For the update we ended waiving the majority of the fees, the amounts there applied to developers should be very small, with most seeing something on the order of a few dollars.

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Keiwan5 years ago

Here are two instances I just quickly found: https://itch.io/post/434189 https://twitter.com/moonscript/status/732941480206049281

I definitely also remember there being more examples, since I specifically researched this question of potential payout fees a lot (around the beginning of this year).

I fully understand that the TOS have always given you the potential to apply any additional fees before making a payout, I have read them entirely. My point is that you have communicated something else, are now going against that and officially introducing new fees (perfectly okay) but also applying them retroactively (not okay).

Let's have an example. You are currently not charging a fixed hosting fee, but have instead implemented your "Open revenue sharing" model. You still have to pay hosting fees yourself, I think everybody knows that. Your TOS give you the option to deduct these fees from every payout but you have communicated that you don't. Based on this information people are deciding on a revenue share. Now, you could come along and replace the open revenue sharing model with a fixed percentage fee, but then saying "Well, we've always had to pay hosting fees, so now you're going to have to retroactively pay them as well" would again be unacceptable (even though technically in accordance with your TOS). It's a communication and trust issue.

As I've also tried to stress before, (at least to me) this is absolutely not about the amount of extra fees I've had to pay. As you said yourself, it was not that much in the grand scheme of things, which then again makes me understand even less why you didn't decide to just waive them as well instead of setting the precedent of introducing new fees against what was communicated and retroactively applying them.

Quick sidenote, since I just noticed it: The link for "Read more about PayPal fees" here is broken.

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