Retail Order Gateway Terms and Fees:
TrepStar Buy Now buttons & Cart Terms, Fees, and Net Proceeds:
[See Examples]Fees Related to Transactions:
-
Refund Fee: You may see a report transaction showing a status of 'Refunded'. This occurs when a customer requests a refund.
Our policy is to give the customer a refund when they ask because if not, they almost always initiate a chargeback which is even more costly to you (the retail publisher).
Click here for more details about $15.00 refund fee.
- Chargeback Fee: Chargebacks occur when a customer calls their bank or credit card company and disputes the charge instead of simply asking you or us for a refund.
Click here for more details about $30.00 chargeback fee. - Process Fee: We charge a simple flat 5.0% * processing fee deducted from the retail price you set.
For example, if you charge $20.00 for your product, we charge 5.0% which is $1.00 in this example.
If you used your own cart and merchant service (like Paypal buttons, Shopify, ThriveCart, Stripe, Square etc.), you would pay a base transaction
fee of about $0.49 plus (2.9% - 4.4%) of the retail price plus shipping charges (process fee) plus monthly fees ($30 - $150 per month).
Thus, on a $20.00 item, they would charge you a minimum of $0.49 + $0.70 = $1.19
which is usually more or about the same than the flat fee that TrepStar charges.
We are simply passing on our fees to you like all merchants that collect money on behalf of a retailer.
Paypal and other merchants may advertise 2.9% but they charge 4.4% to accept international credit cards (for example).
In fact, TrepStar pays fees of over 3.7% on average just to collect money from our publishers.
NOTE: The $0.49 transaction fee that most merchants charge is what really increases the cost to most retailers (TrepStar does not charge this to you) but it's blended into the flat process fee. Since most payments are small (less than $20), the total fees (transaction + process) add up to a much higher percentage (often over 10%). This means the 5.0% fee that TrepStar charges is actually lower or about the same than you would pay elsewhere in most cases because we do not deduct a transaction fee from your net proceeds. How can we do this? During checkout, your customer pays the additional shipping & handling. We charge enough to cover our costs, and make a small profit. - Address Correction Fee: Customers sometimes type in bad, or partially incorrect shipping addresses. At times, this will cause postage printing to fail.
In this case, we have to manually fix the address before postage is printed correctly. Sometimes, we can see the customer just typed something wrong, or we know how to edit
and fix the address. If we're not sure, we email the customer for you (they gave their email during ordering) and ask their help to correct the address.
We then respond to that email and adjust the address so postage prints correctly. We may have to try this several times to get it to work.
This is very manual and time consuming. We do this for a small fee ($1.50). Consider this: Most of our competition
simply fails to ship the item (or notify you) and you never know until the customer complains 3 weeks later. Then, you have to figure out what when wrong,
and order again (full cost wholesale order) with the correct address. These address corrections cost TrepStar money in terms of labor costs.
It may take as much as 2 to 10 minutes or more (and sometimes this must be repeated) for our employees to handle this from start to
finish which can be as much as $10.00 in costs to us, so we think $1.50 is fair as opposed to requiring you to order again at full cost.
* If the total retail price of the products ordered is more than $200.00 the transaction fee is 10.0% instead. This helps insure TrepStar from situations where a customer issues a chargeback after we've paid you a large retail proceed. To justify this additional risk, we charge a higher fee for really high priced products or cart orders. Click for Shopping Cart Pricing Comparison
Net Proceeds, Publisher Payments, and Minimums:
- Monthly Fee: We do not require a credit card or payment method.
However, we charge a small $9.95 monthly fee if you have any net proceeds.
You can only have net proceeds if you have had previous sales. This fee is deducted each month until you withdraw your funds.
The primary reason we charge any fee at all is to avoid having a lot of small accounts payable amounts sitting around indefinitely.
In addition, unlike most shopping carts that charge you monthly fees regardless of account activity,
we only deduct this fee if you have a positive retail account balance. Most shopping carts charge you between $30.00 and $100.00 per month
and many times you have to sign up for lengthy merchant account contracts (several years) of $50.00 or more per month.
Most eCommerce/shopping systems will either charge lower monthly fees with longer terms if they offer any discounts at all.
We deduct our monthly fee during your first month of use, then again on or near the first of each month only if you have any net proceeds.
Click for Shopping Cart Pricing Comparison
- Payment Method: We pay you (the publisher) by PayPal only. We do not send checks or pay you in any other way. If you do not have Paypal, you cannot
use our system. Edit your publisher settings and specify your PayPal email address. PayPal is the ONLY way we pay you. Don't ask later to be paid in a different way.
This reduces fraud, which in turn keeps all of our costs as low as possible.
- Receiving Net Proceeds: Login to your TrepStar account and click the 'Withdraw' button (will only be displayed if you have any retail orders).
You may request your funds once every 14 days.
We will then transfer the net amount to your PayPal account.
- Minimum payment: $10.00. We have to pay PayPal a $1 mass payment fee to send you your net proceeds.
If your payment is over $100 we will not charge you this $1 fee. Otherwise, we will reduce your payout by the $1 fee that we are charged.
You can request a payment once every 14 days as long as your net
proceeds exceed $10.00.
- Delay in Publisher Payment:
For a number of reasons including technical, accounting and tax reasons, when an order is placed, funds go to TrepStar first (not directly to your PayPal account).
We then pay you from that account. Because we first collect the money, customers can request refunds or force chargebacks which comes out of our account.
Therefore, we need to hold funds long enough before we pay you net proceeds to make sure we have enough funds to cover refunds or chargebacks.
- We temporarily hold payments for orders processed within 25 days .
- For example, if someone ordered today, we can not pay you the net proceeds from that order until 25 days have passed since it was ordered.
- Reason: customers that buy your product may ask for a high rate of refunds and can issue a chargeback well after the product was purchased.
- We require a wait time to help prevent fraud, and reduce chargeback fees and refunds that we do not want to pay for.
- Doing this helps us manage refunds and chargebacks so we don't get stuck with the bill.
- Since we're not asking you for a credit card or bank information (so we could just bill you), we must ensure we hold the funds long enough.
- If you were doing this directly, you would have to supply a credit card and/or bank information so any chargebacks could be debited to your bank account or credit card.
- Since we are acting on your behalf, and not requiring that extra security step, we have to hold funds for this short time.
- In other words, if you started to sell today, the net proceeds from that days orders would not be available until 25 days later. At that point, you are able to withdraw net proceeds for any transactions 25 days or older.
- Once you make a withdrawal, you must wait 14 days to make the next withdrawal. Thus, going forward, you are able to withdraw once every 14 days.
- On each withdrawal, you will be receiving the net proceeds for all transactions that are 25 days old or older.
- In the end, if you stop selling product, you are still able to collect until no more net proceeds are available.
- Exchange Rate: Normally, TrepStar is not charged additional fees by Paypal to make a payout to your Paypal account. If your Paypal account is not a
domestic (USA) account, there may be additional exchange rate or other fees Palpal charges us during the payout process. We deduct those fees from your
total net payout amount. We will not know that amount until the payout occurs because it changes depending on the amount paid and the current exchange rate.
- Wholesale Balance: If you owe us money for wholesale orders, you must pay that first before withdrawing retail order net proceeds.
We can't blend funds from retail to wholesale for accounting, billing, reporting/reconciling reasons.
You have to pay your wholesale account balance first, then your retail order funds can be available if you reach the minimum payment amount.
- Final Fee: Instead of charging high monthly usage fees, TrepStar keeps any remaining net proceeds only if they are below our minimum payout
$10.00. This means if there is only a few dollars in the account when you quit using our system, we keep that amount.
This is a fee for using our service. We choose to do this instead of charging you higher monthly fees.
- Comparison: Remember, you could be charged $150.00 or more per month if you set up your own eCommerce system
and shopping cart from someone else (e.g. www.Shopify.com, SamCart, ThriveCart etc.). The TrepStar purchase page is very low cost alternative.
Report Headings:
Status: Credit card or Paypal processing status:
- Completed: Funds were collected or refunded (in the case of a chargeback).
- Pending: Order was placed, but we must manually review the order. It flagged our system as possible fraud. It will either be rejected, or marked
Completed at which time you will see two entries for this order. Once marked completed, it will be made and shipped at that time.
- Rejected: The order was rejected because it did not pass our fraud tests. We never made or shipped the product and you are not charged any
refund fees, or chargeback fees, but no income was generated on this order.
- Refunded: Customer requested a refund. Refund fees apply (see details below)
Other Terms:
- Product Title: The title of your product.
- Qty: Quantity ordered of that product.
- Cost: The cost of producing the unit. We charge the customer for shipping and handling (instead of charging you), but we deduct the product item cost from your
retail proceeds so the S + H charges to your customer do not seem too high or unreasonable. This way, your customer will more likely complete the purchase rather than abandon their shopping cart.
To adjust your need proceeds, change your retail price and modify the 'Absorb S/H Cost%' setting (see "Ship:" below).
- Gross: The total amount including shipping and handling. We pass on the shipping/handling charge to your customer so you are not charged for it.
- Ship: This is the amount we charged for shipping/handling. The customer can choose between Standard first class shipping, or Priority, or Priority-Express shipping methods.
If you see something like "$-3.75 discounted" in the Ship column, it means you have set the 'Absorb S/H Cost%' in your retail order cart settings.
This setting lets you absorb a percentage of the standard s/h charges from your net proceeds to reduce the s/h charges the customer pays.
By default, we pass the entire amount of s/h charges to the customer. By absorbing some of the s/h charges, more customers will continue with the
sale since they will see smaller s/h charges. Learn more.
- Tax: Because this is a retail order, we have to charge MN (Minnesota) sales tax for those orders where the address is in MN. We pay the state of MN.
This way, you do not have to collect sales tax for orders yourself. TrepStar.com is located in Minnesota.
- Refund Fee $15.00: If a customer demands a refund, we often must issue the refund (we are forced by our merchant services Paypal/Visa/MC/Amex etc).
This takes our time and leads to added support costs, and we are charged a fee which is passed onto you. More details below.
- Chargeback Fee $30.00: If a customer claims they didn't make the purchase (or for almost any reason), they can ask their credit card company to force a chargeback.
When this happens, the funds are taken from our account and given back to the customer, along with charging us a fee.
This takes our time and leads to added support costs. We pass this chargeback fee onto you for cases like this. More details below.
- Process Fee: Visa, MC, Amex, PayPal all charge fees to take credit card purchases. More details below.
- Address Correction Fee: If the customer submits a bad address, postage may fail to print. We charge a small fee to fix it if we can (more details below):
- Net: The order proceeds. This is the amount we owe you. We pass shipping/handling costs to the customer so they are paying for most of the fulfillment costs. You receive the retail amount minus item cost. We subtract processing, refund, or address correct fees as well.