Check/money order payments

[denise]

We have an important update for those who choose to pay us by check or money order: starting today, we've had to place a minimum dollar value order amount of $20USD on carts that are being paid by check or money order. This is because our mail forwarding service has raised both their annual subscription rates and their charge for forwarding mail significantly since we signed up with them, and for any check/money order payment under $20, too much of the payment would be taken up with those costs and we would wind up losing money overall. The number of people using check/money order payment is very small, but we're pretty determined to keep the option for those of you who don't have credit cards easily available; nearly everyone who does pay by check/money order pays for a year of services at a time, so we don't think this change will affect many people overall, but it is necessary in order for us to be able to keep offering the payment method as an option. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience to anyone this affects, though.

While I have you here and since I'm about to flood our notification system anyway[1]: as usual, we will be offering our annual December points bonus of 10% the completed cart value sent to you as points to use on a future order. I'll announce that one formally when we get there, but thought it was worth letting you know in advance since I was here already!

[1] Posting a dw_news post can delay notifications sitewide for an hour or two, due to the extremely high volume of emails generated whenever we post one. Your comment emails may be delayed for a little while after I post this. It was posted at 3:45PM EST/2045 UTC (view in your timezone). Please don't worry about missing notifications until at least two hours from now. You may receive multiple copies of this email notification due to a bug we're still trying to squash [2]: we apologize, and we're still holding out hope we'll be able figure that out and fix it.

[2] (The duplicate notification problem that affects news posts is unrelated to the problem where a few people were getting duplicate notifications for everything this week: that one should be fixed. Duplicate emails for a news post is a different issue! Our notification system is very old and very cranky.)

Comments

[ilyena_sylph]

I went and grabbed the receipts for you!

from from the 1/15/2010 news post:

First, PayPal, our merchant processor, has requested that we remove entries on our service that contain nothing but constitutionally and legally protected speech that is not against our Terms of Service. We will not be complying with PayPal's demand that we remove these legal entries posted by our users: our Guiding Principles say that we won't, and we're sticking by them.

Because we refuse to do so, we will need to switch our merchant processors.

from the 2/22/10 news post:

In a repeat of last month's situation, we have once again come under attack by the same group of people attempting to extort us out of business. We've been back and forth in discussion with Google Checkout, our current payment processor, but they've decided to terminate our business relationship unless we alter our Terms of Service to prohibit all adult content.

This means that we are once again temporarily unable to accept credit cards to buy paid time for your Dreamwidth account, since prohibiting all adult content on the site goes against our Guiding Principles of free expression. We're really sorry about the problem, believe me, but we think it's important to stick to our promises to you. More than important, really: it's a requirement. We're not going to go back on our promises simply because Google and PayPal are unwilling to work with us.

from the 9/8/10 news post

We've seen a few people asking whether or not we accept PayPal for account payments. Unfortunately, we don't; PayPal closed our account with them at the beginning of the year after we refused to censor our users' perfectly legal content at their demand. We thought that your free expression was important enough to us to stick to our guns. Alas, but this means we can't take PayPal. We do accept credit cards (VISA, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express), and checks and money orders in US funds. We know this can be difficult for our users without credit cards and users from outside the US -- if you're having trouble making a payment, you can a) buy a VISA gift card, which will work the same as a VISA card; b) get a friend with a credit card to make a payment for you in exchange for you sending money to them via PayPal; c) send us American Express traveler's checks (or cash in US funds) in the mail. (If you choose C, do be aware that it is a risk -- the money may get lost in the mail, and while traveler's checks can be replaced, cash can't.)

[morrow]

Wow, so it’s a censorship issue? That’s interesting, and thanks for compiling the info for me. I’ve been on DW on and off since the start and now I vaguely remember reading this stuff as it happened. It’s a shame :/

[ilyena_sylph]

You're most welcome!

Yep, they wanted and still want all adult content banned if they're going to be this site's payment processor, and one of the reasons I hang out here is that I know Denise and Mark aren't going to bend to that.

It is a shame on Paypal situation, definitely!

[moon6shadow]

Interesting… Thanks for the explanation! I send my AO3 payment through PayPal so I may need to watch that in the future. Although I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising given literally everything fandom when external money makers and censorship because they want things to be squeaky clean gets involved. Although that may or may work in people’s favour with Twitter right now given the backlash to how things have been panning out so far with Elon’s take over, pending on that one.

(Although I doubt it’ll go far enough to make the Queer community feel safe on there again but I won’t know because I’m not on there but I did go through a FanFiction.Net crackdown and mass migration to AO3 so yeah, and even some mainstream media from my country I listen to doesn’t seem thrilled about the Twitter takeover or at least the reporters themselves seem a bit nervous about the meaning of it all and trying to explain to the average non-American and non-Twitter user listener just what the significant impact to democracy etc. it could all have but anyway!)

I don’t know about other people using PayPal but I do know my main reason for using PayPal with things is because I can cancel or adjust my payments easily without needing to go through organising it with other people or without needing to cancel my payment then having to start a new one if I need to change my bank details, payment amounts etc. so I started to use PayPal for pretty much everything instead. I’m not sure how Dreamwidth handles that stuff though, I’m almost entirely AO3 based so I haven’t really checked, so that may or may not be part of other people’s considerations.

Might have to reconsider direct payments for AO3 though from the sounds of it. On reflect I think originally I couldn’t use PayPal for AO3 then later I needed to update my details or something and PayPal was available so I switched for future convenience of detail changing and auto payment management. Hopefully Patreon doesn’t also become an issue… but anyway, more reasons to support Nebula (YouTube Alternative) and other sites like you guys.