LindeX all that and a bag of chips!

Goodness! LL has done something splendiferously wonderful! LindeX is a total joy to use and its increased the volume of in world business exponentially.

My hats off to you, LL!

Why not post your wonderful experience with LindeX below!!

LindeX is such a pleasure to use, I hardly have to bother myself with thoughts of what it did to GOM.

~Ulrika~

I have been extremely impressed with how quickly the market has not only rebounded, but seems headed quickly to 4.00 and beyond. It is already in the 3.83 range, and was at 3.77 just two days ago when I did a small test sale. My only complaint would be the 3.5% fee, which seems a bit high. Overall though, I have been very impressed with it, and with the responsiveness of Lawrence Linden to add changes as quickly as possible.

Whoa! That's a mighty slice of the pie for LL. Hopefully, it is a flat service charge and not a regressive service fee (bulk discounts) like GOM had.

Hmm. I had heard that they weren't going to charge for this service. Was that just a rumor created to make the supplanting of GOM more palatable?

~Ulrika~

Ulrika,

It is actually the credit card processing fee, I do believe. They do incur a cost on the transaction, which is passed along to the seller. GOM passed along the paypal fee.

A flat 3.5% credit-card processing fee? Ouch.

Thankfully, grocery stores and gas stations don't add a 3.5% fee to all purchases for using a credit card.

~Ulrika~

No, they just build it into the total price along with their markup for service and profit.

Ulrika,

Gas stations, grocery stores, etc.. all pay credit card transaction fees - their cost are figured into the price of the items in the first place. It is a cost of doing business. The buyers of L$ are not paying the fee, the sellers are. If you have an online store selling products, you get charged a percentage fee of every credit card transaction - it is one of the ways credit card companies and banks make money. There is nothing unusual about it here - I would hope they could negotiate down the rate though, it does seem a bit steep even by merchant account standards.

I see. I never realized that credit-card companies charged a flat percentage rate of 3.5% for all purchases (that's actually higher than some state taxes). I had always assumed that they charged a single fixed fee per transaction, since each transaction requires the same amount of resources to process.

~Ulrika~

The rate credit card companies charge varies by product sector and type of merchant. For example restaurants pay a smaller percentage than say hardware stores. And, as you might expect, it is the smaller, local stores that have to pay a bigger percentage. I doubt Linden Lab is big enough to negotiate a smaller fee!

Nah, credit card fees are abysmal for processing, your looking at a fairly high %, plus some amazing yearly fees. Plus, if you raise your prices for people who pay with credit cards, to compensate, then your in violation of contract, and you get hit with all sorts of trouble.

-Adam

I am sure it probably varies - I just know from my work in dealing with credit card processing as part of sites that I have developed for clients that merchant account. Credit card processing for online businesses also tends to be higher than for corresponding brick and mortar companies. The sheer amount of fraud online with credit cards is one of the factors, since in person you physically have a card. Another factor that affects the costs online as well is you may have more than one charge - you may have a gateway service fee, and then a merchant account fee.

For example, I developed a site for an airline client that allows travel agencies to securely purchase the serialized ticket stock that airline tickets are printed on (it is controlled like currency). The site uses a lot of anti-fraud measures, including AVS (address verification), CCV (the little number on the back of the card), the Verified by Visa password system , and other measures. They pay a premium for these services with a gateway company that provides the secure connection to the credit card network that processes the actual transaction. I don't know exactly what their rate is, but i would imagine between the credit card companies and the gateway, it may be 10% or more of the transaction total. It is a very lucrative business, but it is also a business that has a lot of value added services to it. It is also a business with a lot of liabilities, especially in the age of zero liabilitiy credit cards for consumers in the case of fraud.

I found a really good explanation for you here:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,292172,00.html

I want to educate myself on the size and types of surcharges that small business pay credit-card companies. After some searching on Google, I haven't found anything useful. Does someone have this information or know where I can find it?

EDIT: I started this before Cristiano's post above. I'll start there.

~Ulrika~

I'm pretty happy with the LindeX service so far. I'm looking forward to automated withdrawal. I wish we'd had this months ago during my boomtime. ;D

LindeX is the best thing since sliced olive loaf.

My only complaint is that it didn't e-mail me to let me know my Lindens were sold. I had to login and check, not expecting them to have sold since I set them to a fairly high rate. But (yay!) the Linden value went up.

Now how do I get the USD out of my account? It is NOT obvious on the site at all.

I agree; Kelly Linden posted this link in response to a similar question on the Hotline a few days ago. But the Lindens really need to add a link to this information on the Currency tab.

So ah, Beryl... there's currently four options on that menu to the left:


You'd want "transaction fees" to be there too?

of course LL is out to make a buck just like 90% of its customer base. I wouldn't of expected anything less from them.

Indeed, or somewhere more obvious, at least, than a not-very-clearly defined link on the Buy and Sell pages (as it is now). Enough people have seemed confused about this withdrawal information, myself included initially, that it begs a more clearly delineated link... at least, to me (and, I would assume, the others who've asked), anyway.

Edit: Kelly Linden even echoed my sentiment on this subject in this thread when he said, "The information does seem to be in an obscure place."

AHA! I AGREE.

Well let's do something about it shall we?

Faint praise indeed.

I've placed some of my L$ on the LindeX for sale at a price equivalent to average GOM (before the Lindens screwed them over) prices, the day after it went public beta. I'm *still* sitting and waiting for it to sell.

It wont be getting any claims of 'great!' or 'wonderful!' from me until at the very least it can can do as well as GOM did. Until then, all it's done is gone from a hugely worse service to a somewhat worse service.

Right now it's like praising the fact you got a knife in the arm instead of a gun to the head.


- Newfie

GOM was sitting at over 3.80 before they announced what LL was going to be developing?

It's nice to see praises of LindeX from those who until recently bashed Lindens for starting this service and how L$ was going to crash even further I would once again congratulate Lindens and Philip once again for their courageous decision to start this service.