LFGSS survives by donations

Bump for the donations! :-)

Ive sold a bike recently so this is my part

Come on fellas,
People makes money via evilbay, pay fees, here, no

Bump bump

1 Attachment

Bumpety bump due to my once again failed attempt to create a monthly donation. Will do my usual pestering of paypal to see what random reason they give me this time :-)

Your PayPal saga is truly a saga of epic proportions. I have no idea why it's so broken, and neither do they.

I knew I'd be famous for something one day, but this isn't what I was hoping for...

Have you looked at Patreon for managing donations?

I've thought about it, but the amount that they deduct is significant and we rely on a large number of small donations.

Deducting 5% for Patreon in addition to the underlying fee of credit card companies that are charging between 4-7% (which they do via Patreon due to the small payment size) is just too much... a good example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/4mbssu/fees/ Fees can be as high as 12% and average 10% in total.

By comparison PayPal are deducting a sliver over 2%.

Given that the donations are barely sufficient in Winter, and are enough in Summer when the affiliates earn a little bit too... I wouldn't want to move to Patreon and take off 8-10% more over the year.

On the upside... all affiliates are dying, except Hiscox. A single referral earned more than almost all others last year. So I'm actually quite tempted to put a logo advert on the front page for them, and may experiment with helping to highlight the better affiliates, i.e. the ones with really good product, good service, etc.

I'm going to be changing my bike insurance over to Hiscox possibly, so if I do will link from here, any particular link/page I should link to?

Any link on LFGSS to their co.uk site works.

i.e. this one: https://www.hiscox.co.uk/home-insurance

That's for contents insurance which is one the most cost effective ways to insure bikes.

But you can use Bikmo to also get Hiscox underwriting and they also pay affiliates:
https://bikmo.com/

As a way to avoid the Paypal charges for you, I'd be happy to setup a Standing Order for my (meagre) monthly donation. Or would you rather it all centralised through Paypal?

It's all your fault!

Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding your attempts to create a monthly donation plan with a seller but that you are unable to do so and that you have previously been information that the fault likely lies with the seller's webpage.
We have reviewed your PayPal account and I can confirm that your account is set up without issues and that you should be able to sign up for the donation plan without issue. There is nothing stopping you from creating this subscription from your PayPal account. The explanation as to why you are unable to create the donation is plan is likely because the seller's website is not correctly set up for these kind of subscriptions. The seller might need to contact their web developer and look into this matter, but we cannot do so for them on their behalf.
Once the seller has resolved the issue on their end, you should be able to complete the payment.
It is my pleasure to assist you. Thank you for choosing PayPal.
Yours sincerely,
Peter
PayPal

They are idiots.

I wish we could persuade them to look at both accounts at the same time. Then they can be caught in their own paradox of them both being correctly configured.

But, contakt web devlprz plz.

Well... PayPal host the payment page that the https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=9ZKHFRC7LGD3L link points to... so I guess I should contact them.

Bump.

Regular work for me = regular donation for you (us)!

:)

Presumably @Velocio you will update us if more funding is required? I donate a month or so ago but happy to do more if and when required

Done a couple of one of donations, and now happy to set up a regular donation. What's the minimum regular donation that makes it worthwhile? I recollect if it's too small the donation all gets eaten up in fees.

Be good to know that also :-)

Presumably @Velocio you will update us if more funding is required? I donate a month or so ago but happy to do more if and when required

Money goes into PayPal, bills go onto credit card, at the end of each month I pay the credit card from PayPal (via a shuffle that goes Withdraw to Bank > Pay Credit Card from Bank).

So long as the PayPal balance doesn't hit empty, I basically ignore the funding stuff totally.

If I'm quiet... all is good.

The PayPal is presently over £300 up, but anyone who looks at the microcosm.app domain name will notice that the renewal is coming up (and it's £216 per year) so I expect it to be only about £80 up in a month or so.

I'm still good with that position, breaking even or coming out fractionally ahead is a very good position for a large website in 2017 that has no adverts on it.

If this position changes, I will let people know.

Done a couple of one of donations, and now happy to set up a regular donation. What's the minimum regular donation that makes it worthwhile? I recollect if it's too small the donation all gets eaten up in fees.

Fees and amounts received:

• £1 donation = 23p in fees, 77p received = 23% in fees
  
• £2 donation = 27p in fees, £1.73 received = 13.5% in fees
  
• £3 donation = 30p in fees, £2.70 received = 10% in fees
  
• £5 donation = 37p in fees, £4.63 received = 7.4% in fees
  
• £10 donation = 54p in fees, £9.46 received = 5.4% in fees
  
  

Basically fees as a % of donation go down as the donation amount goes up.

I personally think that 10% in fees is the maximum acceptable, so £3 is the lowest I'd recommend.

But... some people do have £1 donations each month, and there are a lot of donors of below £3... by itself this isn't particularly efficient, but it does add up, there are a lot of them.

Ultimately every bit contributes, it's just a personal decision for you as to how much you're willing to give to PayPal rather than towards the forum costs.

Where's the donate button gone?

My monthly pay pal seems to have failed. I think I have sufficient funds, so is there an issue?

Where's the donate button gone?

When I change the logo from blue to black to blue... it wipes the button :)

I manually put it back when I remember.

Otherwise, the link is always in the LFGSS drop down on the nav bar or in the first post of this thread.

My monthly pay pal seems to have failed. I think I have sufficient funds, so is there an issue?

PayPal says:

We've sent your customer an email asking them to make sure their payment information is correct.

The automatic payment from mw morris has failed 1 times. As a result, we will not try to process this automatic payment again. You should contact your buyer to collect the outstanding balance.

They seem to believe that a funding source has expired... maybe the automatic payment is set up to come from a funding source regardless of whether you have balance? PayPal is weird at times.

I believe that the subscription is still active, just that one of the payments failed... it will continue every month until 3 failures have occurred. It just missed this month and won't let me try again or anything.

Feel free to ignore, maybe it will work next month?

Also... I can cancel it altogether, and then you'd need to set up a new donation if you wanted to.