Erik is right. The immediate answer for this person is that
cash is required in these situations. I'll write and let
him.
Some general points related to the long term issue.
Trivia first: Technically, a bank draft is a check written
by one bank against its deposits in another bank. What he
probably meant was a Counter Check, which is a
nonpersonalized check form of check you can get at the bank
counter. Or he could have meant a personal check -- or a
Cashier's Check or Certified Check, which is a check drawn
against funds the Bank certifies to the payee to be
available to cover the amount of the check.
In any event, if they cannot use Paypal and are not from
the USA, processing any of the above types of checks will
cost us $17 each. For those folks we can either accept a
check for a gain of $3 each or require that they send cash
in USA currency for gain of $33 each. Note that converting
currency is going to cost them extra.
I suspect there are less than 20 such folks per year but
let's assume 20. If we receive checks from these folks,
that's about $60 revenue against and estimate cost of
roughly $400 per year. If we receive cash from each of
these persons instead, that would be a gain of about $660
or the equivalent of about 2 TAG ads.
Maybe Phil can get someone to sponsor these foreign
memberships by buying an ad once a year.
After February, especially if we are not involved in
working on a 2005 convention, I can look around again for
reasonable arrangement for us to accept cred cards
directly, which will probably mean dropping paypal so that
we can maintain enough volume to make the cred card
arrangement affordable.
I have not investigated whether accepting cred cards
directly will end up with similar limitations on
transactions from some foreign countries. If so, that would
just mean that AGA would be responsible for covering any
cred card purchase that AGA accepted but could not be
processed.
sh
--- Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com> wrote:
Bank Draft means essentially they write a check that
costs us more money
to cash than the membership itself. PayPal doesn't take
payments from
Malta. :(
- Erik
On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Cheryl Rogers wrote:
Erik, forwarding to you because he says nice things
about the web site. :-)
Scott, pretend I'm stupid and explain to me in simple
words what he means by
"bank draft."
Cheryl
PS Stephan told me a couple of his Maltese friends were
interested.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: FW: Becoming a member with aga
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:21:38 +0100
From: Ramon Vella <rams@onvol.net>
To: <cheryl@wilstream.com>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello there. I find your website extremely informative
and
professionally organized. When trying to fill
registration there was no
option for my country. (Malta)
How can I subscribe? Possibly by sending a bank draft
in US dollars and
filling in the traditional membership form?.
I m really looking forward to share and display my
aquascapes with other
aga fellows, possibly entering in the yearly aga
competitions .
Best regards , looking faithfully for an answer,
Ramon Vella
--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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