Small Transaction Fee

To accept your credit card or Paypal payment, we charge a small transaction fee to cover some of our costs. TrepStar is charged a $0.49 transaction fee PLUS 3% to 5% of the payment amount just to accept your online payment. The industry keeps raising these transaction fees which makes small payments very expensive to us.  

There are a few reasons why we charge a transaction fee:   

• You created your TrepStar account on or after January of 2022.
• If you submit payments of  around $10 - $15 or less most of the time.
• Or, within a single session or day, you submit an order, then pay, then go back in and submit another order, then pay again etc...   The system was designed so you submit all of your orders first, then pay at the end which helps us avoid transaction fees that we have to pay.  

TrepStar incurs a transaction fee for each credit card, or PayPal payment we accept.   Because of this fee, small payments cost us a lot more in terms of percentages and wipes out most of any profit.  

We pay 49 cents per transaction plus an average* of 3.7% of the total cost.  If all payments we received were $100.00 for example, it's not too bad.  That would be $3.70 (3.7%) plus a 49 cent transaction fee for a total of $4.19.  This is 4.2% of the total money collected.  We have roughly a 10% profit margin.  This means even with high payment amounts, we pay nearly half of our potential profit just to accept your credit card or paypal payment.  This is very frustrating as it is... but it gets worse.

Unfortunately, if the payments are small, most if not all profit is used up just to pay the fees we are charged by the credit card processor companies (visa/mc/amex and paypal).

For example, if your payment is around $10.00,  we pay  $0.49 + 3.7%.    That is 37 cents plus 49 cents for a total of ($0.86).  That's nearly 9% in fees and most of our profit. 

For small payments, we profit almost nothing, and can't keep competitive that way. We are trying to find ways to keep prices low while still making enough money to continue. 

Remember, assuming you plan to use TrepStar for future orders, when you make a payment, choose to pay more than you owe.  This extra amount funds future orders so they will not be on hold but will be produced right away.   For example, instead of paying the minimum amount owed, pay $50 or $100 extra.  This reduces the amount of time you have to spend making payments and helps reduce transaction fees for both of us.

* The average blended credit card fees we pay is about 3.5% to 3.7%.  While some visa debit cards from the USA are at 2.9%, most others are over 2.9%.  We pay 4.4% to 5.4% to accept international credit cards.  For all payments TrepStar receives, we see about a 3.7% average rate.  These percentages continue to go up as more and more credit cards promise cash back and rewards.  These rewards are paid by merchants like TrepStar and ultimately are factored into all consumer prices.  Prior to 8/1/2021, we were billed $0.30 per transaction.  This has been raised to $0.49 per transaction plus a processing fee of around 3.7%  of  the payment amount.