Interkassa: beware of hidden fees, PayPal conversion is now more attractive than conversion rates of many banks
For a long time, as a large hosting service provider, we cooperated with the Interkassa payment gateway, because our customers were comfortable paying for services in various currencies and using several dozens of different, not very common, payment systems, including VISA / Mastercard, although of course mainly used.
But yesterday everything changed ... A client sent us a notice that when paying with a card in rubles, Interkassa offered him a conversion rate that was more than 30% higher than the real one. While the dollar was trading at 60 rubles and even lower on the stock exchanges, Interkassa offered to accept rubles at the rate of over 78 rubles per dollar when paying with a card in rubles!
')
We checked a few payments made from customers and were just horrified when paying with Yandex. With the money, it turned out that, in addition to the 3% payment processing fee, an inadequate amount in rubles was written off from the client, namely, for 103 USD, the amount charged was 8553.04 RUB, which is 83.04 rubles per dollar, the screenshot is attached, the comments are superfluous:
When paying in hryvnia, the situation is not better, for 12.35 USD 280.57 UAH were deducted from the client, that is, a rate of 22.72 hryvnia per dollar was applied:
At the same time, Interkassa has not been processing the withdrawal of USD (WMZ) funds to its trading platforms in a normal mode for the past month, citing the fact that there is a renewal of payment machine contracts with WebMoney for withdrawal in dollars, while withdrawal in rubles and hryvnia is available, moreover, at the rates of the Central Bank and the National Bank, which by themselves diverge from reality within 10-20%. All this month, we were expecting the restoration of normal operation to withdrawal, but we are not alone, we tolerated it, simply so that our customers would be comfortable paying. However, after it turned out that, besides us, we are actually deceiving and taking extra funds from our customers in a legal way, patience is exhausted, we wrote a letter to Interkassa with an appeal to conduct honest business in such difficult times and set adequate payment rates for customers which they honestly pay to the commission, to which they received the answer that today they have such a scheme of work, the actual conversion rate is available at the link: api.interkassa.com/v1/currency , and in order to avoid additional conversion commissions, you should set the payment in the currency in which the client will pay, unfortunately there are no other options ...
From this it follows that Interkassa is silent about the overvalued rates consciously. Yes, they do not hide the API, yes, they show how much you need to pay in rubles or hryvnias, but many customers simply do not consider the funds when making payments (especially small amounts), believing that they will not take more than 3-4 percent of the commission as we alas believed.
We made a firm decision to complete cooperation with such an unholy payment aggregator, like Interkassa, and to avoid unnecessary losses for our customers, as well as to warn everyone in this article - we should be more attentive to our partners, because, alas, they do not always justify their trust . It is sad only that innocent people suffered because of our carelessness and too much trust. Apparently it's time to open the site, an analogue of the British riphiddenfees.com , and talk about possible hidden commissions in public, by the way photos from their shares in London:
We had long planned to start accepting payments with VISA / Mastercard through the most popular payment gateway in the world, PayPal, and once again regretted that we did not introduce this payment method earlier, as there were some technical difficulties with implementing payments in the form we needed. Indeed, for the Western market, such a change in the conversion rate is nonsense, yes, there can sometimes be an overvalued conversion rate, and Habré already had an article “How not to lose money when paying via PayPal” , but there losses could be a maximum of a few percent, not tens of percent ! There, people know that reputation is more valuable than money and it is earned over the years, and you can lose it in a moment. For some reason, people here are not aware of this now, I hope the situation will change over time.
It is fair to say that now the advice on disabling conversion on the PayPal side is not always relevant in Russia and Ukraine, since the conversion rates of many banks have become much less profitable than PayPal conversion rates.
So we just had to leave our programmer without sleep and add PayPal’s card payment acceptance module directly to our Data Center partner’s account, now our customers can pay for services without fees and at the conversion rates!
But yesterday everything changed ... A client sent us a notice that when paying with a card in rubles, Interkassa offered him a conversion rate that was more than 30% higher than the real one. While the dollar was trading at 60 rubles and even lower on the stock exchanges, Interkassa offered to accept rubles at the rate of over 78 rubles per dollar when paying with a card in rubles!
')
We checked a few payments made from customers and were just horrified when paying with Yandex. With the money, it turned out that, in addition to the 3% payment processing fee, an inadequate amount in rubles was written off from the client, namely, for 103 USD, the amount charged was 8553.04 RUB, which is 83.04 rubles per dollar, the screenshot is attached, the comments are superfluous:
When paying in hryvnia, the situation is not better, for 12.35 USD 280.57 UAH were deducted from the client, that is, a rate of 22.72 hryvnia per dollar was applied:
At the same time, Interkassa has not been processing the withdrawal of USD (WMZ) funds to its trading platforms in a normal mode for the past month, citing the fact that there is a renewal of payment machine contracts with WebMoney for withdrawal in dollars, while withdrawal in rubles and hryvnia is available, moreover, at the rates of the Central Bank and the National Bank, which by themselves diverge from reality within 10-20%. All this month, we were expecting the restoration of normal operation to withdrawal, but we are not alone, we tolerated it, simply so that our customers would be comfortable paying. However, after it turned out that, besides us, we are actually deceiving and taking extra funds from our customers in a legal way, patience is exhausted, we wrote a letter to Interkassa with an appeal to conduct honest business in such difficult times and set adequate payment rates for customers which they honestly pay to the commission, to which they received the answer that today they have such a scheme of work, the actual conversion rate is available at the link: api.interkassa.com/v1/currency , and in order to avoid additional conversion commissions, you should set the payment in the currency in which the client will pay, unfortunately there are no other options ...
From this it follows that Interkassa is silent about the overvalued rates consciously. Yes, they do not hide the API, yes, they show how much you need to pay in rubles or hryvnias, but many customers simply do not consider the funds when making payments (especially small amounts), believing that they will not take more than 3-4 percent of the commission as we alas believed.
We made a firm decision to complete cooperation with such an unholy payment aggregator, like Interkassa, and to avoid unnecessary losses for our customers, as well as to warn everyone in this article - we should be more attentive to our partners, because, alas, they do not always justify their trust . It is sad only that innocent people suffered because of our carelessness and too much trust. Apparently it's time to open the site, an analogue of the British riphiddenfees.com , and talk about possible hidden commissions in public, by the way photos from their shares in London:
We had long planned to start accepting payments with VISA / Mastercard through the most popular payment gateway in the world, PayPal, and once again regretted that we did not introduce this payment method earlier, as there were some technical difficulties with implementing payments in the form we needed. Indeed, for the Western market, such a change in the conversion rate is nonsense, yes, there can sometimes be an overvalued conversion rate, and Habré already had an article “How not to lose money when paying via PayPal” , but there losses could be a maximum of a few percent, not tens of percent ! There, people know that reputation is more valuable than money and it is earned over the years, and you can lose it in a moment. For some reason, people here are not aware of this now, I hope the situation will change over time.
It is fair to say that now the advice on disabling conversion on the PayPal side is not always relevant in Russia and Ukraine, since the conversion rates of many banks have become much less profitable than PayPal conversion rates.
So we just had to leave our programmer without sleep and add PayPal’s card payment acceptance module directly to our Data Center partner’s account, now our customers can pay for services without fees and at the conversion rates!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/246545/
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