Alternatives to Paypal

… I see that direct credit card payment is possible now (I ordered for shipping to the UK).

We’ve allowed buyers to pay by either card or Paypal for years. The problem is that we only disburse to Sellers via Paypal. Unfortunately, we still don’t have permission from Supplyframe’s Accounts department to use an alternative disbursement method. It’s something all of us on our team realize is desperately wanted from our Sellers, especially non-US Sellers.

We’ve allowed buyers to pay by either card or Paypal for years. The
problem is that we only disburse to Sellers via Paypal.
Unfortunately, we still don’t have permission from Supplyframe’s
Accounts department to use an alternative disbursement method. It’s
something all of us on our team realize is desperately wanted from
our Sellers, especially non-US Sellers.

Thanks for that clarification.

Then, why not you switch your payment provider?, ideally one that also
allows for SEPA direct debit?

Or, also allow for “paying the seller directly” (which of course gives
not any protection to buyer or seller, but might be easiest in some
cases, e.g. cash on personal collection, or bank transfer, which is
especially in the EU a main method for electronically paying stuff)?

Regards!

I would guess, this isn’t about the payment provider, but more about what the owner of the company allows. I would also guess that things like compliance and prevention of money laundering are very important here. Changing anything like this in a huge company can be a very tedious process.

I did a bit of research, who really owns tindie. I may be wrong, or my information may be outdated, but here is what I found:

Tinde is owned by Hackaday

Hackaday is owned by Supplyframe

Supplyframe is owned by Siemens

I’ve been using Square for over a year as a parallel test and seem to be seller centric not like the child minds in charge at PayPal.

Tindie (Siemens) will not llow an alternative to paypal for seller disbursement…this is the issue. I am not sure how square could solve this problem…

I’m here too to ask something for EU Sellers. The Paypal change USD->EUR is killing us.

Here we are 5 years later and Tindie STILL doesn’t use Wise or ACH transfers like every other professional business on the planet. Does Tindie not have a full-time application programmer? Sooooo many other features missing as well. VERY frustrating, especially considering the fees they charge.

Seems like they are not also interested in EU sellers…

Hi @DCCEX, @theshopdog, @hyuma,

We do not, our team has been working with limited resources for the past decade, and from our recent conversation with Supplyframe leadership there are no plans to further develop Tindie. The local team is doing everything we can to advocate for better payment alternatives.

Again Supplyframe’s accounting team continues to deliberate how to proceed on the issue of acquiring or integrating another payment platform.

I will repeat, this has less to do with technical support and mostly to do with the fact that Siemens owns Tindie and Siemens does not want to use anything but paypal for their own (mostly political/corporate) reasons. So don’t hold your breath and stamp your feet expecting payment alternatives…

Any information about payment in Euro? Not only on dollar?

Hi @hyuma,

Unfortunately at this time I cannot provide a response due to the nature of the decision-making board within Supplyframe. If there is an update to provide at a later date we will announce it publicly.

Ok thanks for the infos , will wait for you for any new update.

I can take an honest answer, that’s good to know. I think it’s time for supplyframe to sell Tindie to someone who will do something with it. It must be difficult to keep good people if they perceive Tindie to be stagnant, or worse, a sinking ship

It’s unfortunate that Supplyframe appear to have no interest in progressing Tindie.

As a maker it is getting to the stage that it’s almost no longer viable to offer your product to other enthusiasts.

I am now facing the PayPal enforced double currency conversion on every disbursement. This has almost been the final straw.

Selling on Tindie, like eBay, has turned into an exercise where the seller is lucky to break even, while everyone else involved in the transaction absorbs the product mark-up in fees, often with blatantly profiteering fees (like PayPal’s enforced unnecessary double currency conversions!).

Increased pricing, to allow actual compensation for the maker, is now pushing prices into the unviable territory.

It’s sad times for the maker community, and enthusiasts wanting to reward makers for their efforts. Currently, the main beneficiary of each reasonably priced Tindie sale, appears to be PayPal.

I just want to be able to sell internationally in USD, and then buy my replacement parts in USD, without unnecessary exorbitant multiple currency conversion fees in between.

I like wise as alternative to PayPal - a lot transparent fees, better exchange rate, they are like a mix of PayPal and bank (not much protection but people can register and pay you via card instead of bank)

Same.

I just looked at the numbers and I’m shocked.
While the current exchange rate USD to EUR is 0.95, my exchange rate including fees is 0.84. So somewhere I’m losing 11% in fees, paid by the customer.

It’s very sad. I always calculated with 8% so prices -only at tindie- just went up another 3%.

An you know what, many customers don’t have USD as their main currency, so EUR customers pay another 3% on top of the 11% to pay me in USD.

If you want to cut out the payment processors all together, you can set up an online store with MagicWebStore . xyz

If you needed USD, you’d pay 1% to convert from BTC to USD at an exchange. If customers didn’t have any BTC yet, they’d be paying another 1%, but that’s a lot better than the percentages we’re seeing now.

Of course, the problem with setting uo your own store is that it’s up to you to get potential customers to your store. As a customer, it’s really nice to have a marketplace where you can see products from a lot of different people.

Other marketplaces like Artisans .coop also use PayPal, so there’s really not a while lot of other choices.

Other marketplaces like Artisans .coop also use PayPal, so there’s really not a while lot of other choices.

You can try lectronz.com they don’t use PayPal, but rely purely on Stripe. It features a tool to import products form Tindie in just a couple of clicks.