Comment · Tue, September 25, 2018 · Natrium Health & Nootropics Depot
Nootropics Depot international fee explanation
Original post in this thread
chronophan · 3 points
I spent a couple hours today and last Friday with three people from my bank trying to understand the random "international fee" charges I've seen on Nootropics Depot bank transactions beginning last April. The people at the bank crawled around the Nootropics Depot site as I had, trying to find a reasonable explanation why a simple domestic transaction for the same products would some months be just a simple domestic transaction and other months would be inadvertently routed though a bank in another country causing an additional fee.
Today I received a curious explanation from explanation from Nootropics Depot support;
* ..we are working with two different card processors. One is located in the US and the other is located in the UK. Transactions processed on our site are load balanced between the two processors so we are unable to predict which charge will go through which processor. However, the UK processor currently only accepts VISA cards. So if you were to use a Master Card or American Express, you would be guaranteed a charge from the US processor. .... I am sorry again for any confusion with this. Unfortunately we have to keep both processors running at all time…
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Natrium Health & Nootropics Depot
This is your bank charging you a fee, not us. I want to make that very clear. Banks are shady as shit, and they will try to make it seem like it is us charging this fee. That's misinformation. It's them charging you a fee for using a card on a processor with an international BIN. Capital One does not charge these fees. The same goes for a few others. Read your card terms, and if your bank is charging you fees to use your own money, drop them. They love to throw things back on vendors to absolve themselves of responsibility, but this is just them taking money from you because they can, plain and simple.
Regarding the load balancing, that's been going on for over a year. Our domestic processor has a processing cap for us each month. So we have to load balance with an offshore processor in the UK to ensure we don't go down at the end of the month like we used to. Remember the Echeck days? That was a nightmare! Luckily our domestic processor has continually increased our limit. So the vast majority of monthly transactions are running through domestically at the moment.
The real moral of the story here is that most banks are shit, and will charge their customers for things simply because they can. If your bank is doing this, I would suggest getting a different one. It's your money. You should not be nickel and dimed by your bank to use it. This is why I think cryptocurrency is going to be huge someday, but that's a different discussion. My suggestion would be to sign up for a Capital One Quicksilver card. There are no fees with that card, and you get unlimited 1.5% cash back on ALL purchases. So you get paid to use your own money, rather than charged. Then just pay it off every month so you don't have any interest. Don't just accept being charged fees by your bank.