The company had planned to charge customers $2 for one-time payments made online or over the phone.
Article Link: Verizon Drops $2 'Convenience Fee' Due to Complaints
- Article Link
- https://www.macrumors.com/2011/12/30/macrumors/
Last edited:
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Verizon Drops $2 'Convenience Fee' Due to Complaints
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Article Link: Verizon Drops $2 'Convenience Fee' Due to Complaints
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/9A405)
"95% of our customers switched back to paper billing in spite, get rid of that damned fee"
"95% of our customers switched back to paper billing in spite, get rid of that damned fee"
So they drop the fee after the FCC said they will investigate the legitimacy of the $2 convenience fee.
Still, Verizon has revealed their true colors. They will not be able to make consumers forget.
Oh well, all American mobile operators suck anyhow. Verizon is a 37" giant in a land of three-foot midgets.
Hasn't been a good month for Verizon PR. This debacle is clearly of their own making. A pox on their houses.
Still, Verizon has revealed their true colors. They will not be able to make consumers forget.
Oh well, all American mobile operators suck anyhow. Verizon is a 37" giant in a land of three-foot midgets.
Hasn't been a good month for Verizon PR. This debacle is clearly of their own making. A pox on their houses.
Don't be fooled
This had nothing to do with customer complaints.
They dropped the fee when the FCC came into the game. If not for that, they would have let it ride.
This had nothing to do with customer complaints.
They dropped the fee when the FCC came into the game. If not for that, they would have let it ride.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)
Glad to see this was shot down!
Glad to see this was shot down!
Hardly.
This is only a victory for the credit card companies. I wouldn't be shocked at all if their lobbyists were making phone calls like mad in the last week or so. It's easy to look at it as a $2 fee, but if you look deeper, the fee only served as a push for consumers to investigate alternative ways to pay electronically through their bank which were just as simple and convenient but also safer. Sure, Verizon would make more money once they stopped having to pay a credit card company 2-3% processing fees, but again, why should they piss money away when there's a new, better and safer solution for all parties involved? It makes no logical sense when you think critically about it.
If people took the time to understand the implications and stopped wielding this foolishly-conceived notion of "freedom" around like a sword, they'd see that transitioning to electronic payments directly from the banks via eChecks/wire transfers (auto-pay is completely different and still set up through Verizon) is just as simple if not simpler than paying online through Verizon, safer because your bank is the only one that has your account information, and yet still better for Verizon because instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year to credit card companies, they could add to their profits which would make shareholders happy (which I don't care about but...) and then ideally lead to more money directed at maintaining, expanding and improving the network.
Again, the only winners here are the credit card companies, and they are absolutely not the one's that need any victories these days. Verizon and other corporations may have other issues worth discussing in terms of their ever-escalating bills and bandwidth caps and network progress and quality, but they're small fish compared to the credit companies.
Yes it would be cheaper for them.
I always roll my eyes when a company asks to switch me to electronic billing for MY convenience. It's obvious it saves the company more that it helps me. Somehow the offers never seem to offer a discount for this benefit to me.
Personally, I'm an old fuddy duddy who likes to keep the paper bills for a while to verify the charges. Just don't seem to look at the electronic bills as closely as paper.
Great! That saves me the trouble of setting up an automatic PAPER check being sent via SNAIL MAIL.
It's just a game to suck more money out of their customers. It reminds me of when Ma Bell would charge for touch tone phone service over rotary dial even though the technology was cheaper for them to run.
Yes I'm old and have seen technology fees gimmicks before.
It's just a game to suck more money out of their customers. It reminds me of when Ma Bell would charge for touch tone phone service over rotary dial even though the technology was cheaper for them to run.
Yes I'm old and have seen technology fees gimmicks before.
Again, incase you don't know, there's a 2-3% credit card processing fee on every transaction we make with a credit or debit card (unless we use our pin on the debit). So if we pay Verizon $100 for our bill, they get $97-98. If we set up electronic payment through our bank via wire billing or eChecks, you can still skip all the paper on their end, eliminate the 2-3% processing fees that go to the credit card companies and minimize liability in having to process subscribers secure account information. Meanwhile, we consumers still have the ease and convenience of paying electronically and all of our account information stays with the bank, so it's more secure for us.
It would've been a win-win if they stuck to their guns and continued to encourage/push people to set up bill paying through their banks. We will all be doing more and more of that in the next few years anyways because it's safer and ultimately more convenient to be able to pay all monthly bill payments from one centralized space.
This has made my life infinitely easier than paying online with a credit card:
https://www.chase.com/online/services/bill-pay-demo.htm
I have all my monthly billers set up to be paid there and I can schedule payments or pay manually whenever I'd like. I can just login on the Chase app on my iPhone or iPad or go to chase.com and it's all on one page. I get all my statements via e-mail and then just login on the iPhone and pay them. It's easier and it's safer.
And sure, Verizon is able to make more money by keeping that 2-3%, but does anyone actually think it's better that it's going to Visa or Mastercard? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Great news, now I won't have to worry about ATT trying to pull the same crap. If you don't think they already have credit card fees baked into their model, you're a moron. This was simply an attempted money grab by them and their customers called their bluff.
Mark my words, they'll find a way to add some fee to screw their customers. I give it a few months, at most.
I choose to pay as many bills as possible with my credit card. I like the year end statements, ease of finding any transaction and oh yeah, my cash back.
Mark my words, they'll find a way to add some fee to screw their customers. I give it a few months, at most.
I choose to pay as many bills as possible with my credit card. I like the year end statements, ease of finding any transaction and oh yeah, my cash back.
Yes it would be cheaper for them.
I always roll my eyes when a company asks to switch me to electronic billing for MY convenience. It's obvious it saves the company more that it helps me. Somehow the offers never seem to offer a discount for this benefit to me.
Personally, I'm an old fuddy duddy who likes to keep the paper bills for a while to verify the charges. Just don't seem to look at the electronic bills as closely as paper.
The money they save on printing and mailing paper statements pails in comparison to what they lose when we pay online with a credit card and they have to pay 2-3% credit processing fees on every transaction to the credit card company. My bill with Verizon is about $260 a month (family plan, 4 iPhones, 1 voice-only phone, family texting, 25% corporate discount hanging around from an old part-time retail job). If I pay with a credit card and they're only paying 2% to the credit companies, they're losing about $62.40 a year on me alone, and that's just so I can pay with a credit card. It doesn't cost them anywhere close to $62.40 a year to send me paper bills and process my checks. I think a generous estimate would be $15 a year to send me bills and process and verify my physical checks.
Spread that out over 107 million subscribers. Even if only 10% of subscribers are paying by credit card (it's likely a great deal more), you're still talking hundreds of millions of dollars lost in credit processing fees. For years, this was a cost of doing business as many have suggested, and they swallowed it because there wasn't a better way. But now, there are many better ways for not only them but us, so they tried to make a move. I don't fault them for it. I'd fault them for plenty of things before this. This makes sense and in my mind would've added up to progress.
This, and recurring electronic billing. Because paying the bill means you agree with the charges. Absolutely nobody should use recurring electronic billing for a cell phone for this reason alone.
With a credit card, you can call the CC issuer and have the charge reversed if you plan on disputing the charge (but if you're paying manually you'd not pay an absurdly high bill in the first place.) With your bank you are out the money, end of story. Let's tack on some overdraft/NSF fees while we're at it.
I don't know who VZ thought they were going to pull the wool over, like BAC's wanting to charge fees for accessing your own money.
Sure, sometime in the future there might be a safe and effectively free way of sending money anywhere. (EFT/ACH is free, but not safe in North America, however in Australia, EFT is the norm. In North America, the credit card is the norm.) There is too much redtape involved in North America to get over the banks inertia to make it safer (either one-time use codes or deposit-only codes) for transfers between banks and credit unions without having to physically go withdraw the money from an ATM and hand it to someone else for them to turn around and put it right bank into the same ATM. No instead we write a check, which may cost both the check writer and receiver a fee, and it's held for a week.
This has nothing to do with credit card fees. They are eliminating SINGLE payments. You still could've been doing monthly credit card payments without the fee.
What they want is to incentivize you to have recurring deductions, credit or debit, so that they are more likely to have their bills paid on time. This way you can't forget to pay. You also stop checking your statement as much, because you don't need to inspect the payment amount every time before you pay. This means that if you get overcharged or get hit with crazy overuse charges, you won't notice it, since you have the automatic credit/debit (And you may not be checking your statements as thoroughly).
What they want is to incentivize you to have recurring deductions, credit or debit, so that they are more likely to have their bills paid on time. This way you can't forget to pay. You also stop checking your statement as much, because you don't need to inspect the payment amount every time before you pay. This means that if you get overcharged or get hit with crazy overuse charges, you won't notice it, since you have the automatic credit/debit (And you may not be checking your statements as thoroughly).
don't offer up that form of payment in the 1st place if you are going to charge customers for it. Things became advanced and all the sudden all these major companies accept credit card payments to get you off of the old fashioned way of sending in a payment by check. Now that everyone is hooked to paying that way they want to charge everyone a $2 fee. Do these CEO's have any clue what they are doing? Who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to charge a fee for payment like Verizon did or charge $5 to use your debit card like Bank of America??
You are all the sudden concerned with how credit card companies operate? Look at the greed and profit that cell phone companies have been charging on customers for years. You aren't angry that you pay $250/month for CELL service? That is a car payment. Sounds like someone doesn't know how to manage a credit card and is mad about all the latest regulation with those.
The phone company
I'm retired but my old job included programming the phone switch for a government agency. The fees you pay the phone company are a total ripoff. Caller ID, for example, is a one time two minute programming job and requires no maintenance. They still charge you monthly for the service although it cost them nothing except a one time expense of a few minutes of time of a programmer. All add ons are just the same. What a scam!
