40c surcharge on Mobile Phone Top-ups

Pigman II

What's the deal with the 40c surcharge on Mobile Phone Top-ups and more confusingly why are some shops charging it and others not?

BuffyBot

Did you even try google?

Try here

Gordon

Mobile companies are charging retailers more afaik. Therefore the retailers make less profit, therefore they pass on the charge to the customer who will hopefully show their disgust at the "greedy" mobile companies by lobbying and then either the retailers will be compensated by the mobile companies or everything will go back to how it used to be.

The reason that the mobile companies give is "the lesser denomination topups are less profitable" (this is not a precise quote, I can't remember the actual quote).

This is only afaik, I didn't read that article by Buffy.

aidan_dunne

I remember a while ago, though, when the retailers first introduced this surcharge that Vodaphone took out full page ads in the papers saying that the retailers weren't supposed to charge this and it was illegal and not to buy your top-ups from any retailer that charged this surcharge. To be honest, after that, I haven't seen many retailers charging it, only one or two, from nearly all of them in the beginning.

I usually get mine in the Texaco garage up the road from me, though, and they never charged a surcharge. Maybe it's just something the smaller retailers do.

Turner

Retailers get a better percentage on Go-cards than that on lotto tickets, wonder why they dont put a surcharge on lotto tickets. I only buy go-cards from retailers that dont slap on the extra 40c.

RasTa

yea i work in xtra-vision and as soon as spar next door to us slapped 40c onto 087 top ups
think top up sales went up 200% in the first week

Calibos

The Irish retailers’ body, RGDATA, has lodged a formal complaint with the Competition Authority following Vodafone’s decision to cut retailer profit margins on its electronic top-up facility for mobile phones.

Vodafone Ireland, recently announced the slashing of retail margins from 10 per cent to 6.5 per cent for smaller denomination top-ups. This follows a similar cut in margins from 12 per cent to 10 per cent on the sales of top-up cards last year, which, according to RGDATA, resulted in a loss of 5.5 per cent margin in the course of a year for many independent retailers.
RGDATA said the mobile phone giant gave retailers little or no warning about the reductions.

Director general of RGDATA, Ailish Forde said: “This is a huge reduction in margins, particularly when a year ago, they enticed retailers to go the electronic top-up route as opposed to the physical cards route in order to protect their margins."
Copyright Europe Media.NET

The complaint failed by the way. So you know where I'm coming from-My Father is a newsagent and we do charge the surcharge.

Retailers get a better percentage on Go-cards than that on lotto tickets, wonder why they dont put a surcharge on lotto tickets

Because we always got 6% from the very beginning. Same with Ciggies(10%).Very low margin but always were.

Vodafones' arguement in a letter they sent out to retailers was that this reduction in margins was to fund investment in infrastructure. Sorry but I think its the shareholders or customers that should be doing that. They also said that this investment in turn would increase our turnover. How? When everyone and his granny already has a mobile and at a time when Vodafone were actually haemmoraging(sp) customers to other networks because of their ridiculous 30day credit limit which the other operators had scrapped. At the end of the letter thay actually said,".....we're working with retailers blah blah blah......and dont worry, there wont be any further margin reductions.........for at least 12 months":D

We actually stopped selling them for a few days but found that most other shops in the town were charging a surcharge so thats what we did.

IMO its like the sqeeze that the Supermarkets/Food Processers/Wholesalers put on the Farmers. Sqeeze the farmers margins to next to nothing, the wholesaler maintains his margin of 21% and the Supermarket makes 40%???(EG. the farmer gets 50c/LB beef and its €7/LB by the time it gets to the shelf!!)We are the easy tarket.

Half our turnover is low margin as it is and its only the normal margin(20-21%) items that keep us in business. We have to stop the rot somewhere and take a stand against companies reducing margins and it just happened to be on the phone cards.

Moriarty

I get mine them from vodafone directly via txt msg/their site. Much handier.

Mossy Monk

ATM all the way

leeroybrown

I agree that Vodafone are screwing over the retailers. (They do it to everyone)

I either buy somewhere where the charge isn't imposed or buy 25 Euro or more to avoid paying the surcharge.

Ultimately, I want the best value as a consumer and I always make a point of buying the better priced option where I have a choice (even if it involves a bit extra hassle).