posted on August 1, 2001 10:52:59 AM new
Yes, they are still in business. I have customers pay with their service on occasion, but not very often. They have an interesting business model, and it you check out http://corp.ecount.com you will see that person to person payments isn't their only "thing." That can be good or bad, I suppose.
posted on August 2, 2001 09:44:18 AM new
the main thing attracting me to ecount was that it looks like sellers can receive money for free. Is this the case or am I missing something?.
posted on August 2, 2001 02:09:07 PM new
I believe they charge $1 to the sender and $1 to the receiver. At least that's what they were doing the last time I looked a few months ago when their site still said "Free" and you only found out about the charge after you used it.
They also had a promotion where they were giving $10 to each new account for signing up. After a few weeks, they changed the terms to only if you went to one of their partner sites and spent $30. Of course they did this after several sellers were already advertising "pay me with ecount and get $10 back." And though I sent at least a dozen new accounts to them even before they changed their terms, no one I know got the $10.
The transactions that went through them months ago went smoothly. But in view of these quirks, I no longer use it. There are far better services such as Achex and C2it.
posted on August 3, 2001 05:06:08 AM new
I really like ecount. The only problem I see is the charge to put money in your acount. They have great cust serv. via toll free phone and e-mail.
posted on August 3, 2001 10:16:20 AM new
Thanks for the links.
I have had no problems with Paypal in the 1 year I have been using them, I love the convenience of their service and the debit card. The thing that is killing me are the fee's. Most of the items I sell are under $15.00. Also I do the $1 NR on all my auctions so if anything sells for a buck and they pay via Paypal I'm losing money.
With ecount it looks like they offer pretty much the same service as Paypal including the debit card but costing much less in fee's.
C2it looks OK but I don't like the idea of the buyer paying the fee and having no holding facility for the money. The debit card just makes life so easy for paying for items and ebay fee's etc all on one account.
With Paypal I cant understand why when you upgrade your account you have to start paying for funds that are transferred from another Paypal account to yours. I do understand that Paypal have overheads with credit card transactions and I never used to mind paying the fee for this until they decided it was time to put them up.
If they started giving free transfers paypal to paypal on the upgraded accounts I think they would reduce the risk of losing anymore customers and even maybe bring a few old ones back.
posted on August 4, 2001 12:23:36 AM new
FWIW, I've just spent a little time looking over ecount's fee structure. I have to say, I find it very logical. There is no fee to send or receive money, only a $2.00 fee to move money into one's account via credit card. Doesn't this seem logical to anyone else? They don't charge for transfers from one person's ecount to another person's ecount. Since these types of transfers are little more than database entries, this makes sense, doesn't it? They have no nasty "$0.35 + x.x%" charges like paypal. Now I have to do a little research on the subject of chargebacks, buyer/seller responsibilities, etc. Anybody have any comments?
posted on August 4, 2001 12:24:04 AM new
FWIW, I've just spent a little time looking over ecount's fee structure. I have to say, I find it very logical. There is no fee to send or receive money, only a $2.00 fee to move money into one's account via credit card. Doesn't this seem logical to anyone else? They don't charge for transfers from one person's ecount to another person's ecount. Since these types of transfers are little more than database entries, this makes sense, doesn't it? They have no nasty "$0.35 + x.x%" charges like paypal. Now I have to do a little research on the subject of chargebacks, buyer/seller responsibilities, etc. Anybody have any comments?
