Back in September I tagged an article about CashEdge and their offering of P-to-P payments by using the recipients email address or phone number. Its part of the the Intelligent Money Movement platform offered by CashEdge. My first thought when I read the article was PayPal. I’ve got a PayPal account that I use for the occasional eBay transaction. I can send a P-to-P payment to any other PayPal user if I have their email address.
Yet I’ve only used it for that purpose once outside of an eBay transaction. I paid a co-worker for lunch via PayPal. We had agreed on this method in advance, if for nothing else to just to go through the experience. In that space while the PayPal transaction is convenient, it does require the receiver to pay a fee for each transaction.
The CashEdge product is intended to be part of your online banking experience through a financial institution. The transaction fee for this type of service is often paid by your financial institution, unless they choose to charge a fee to offset or recoup their costs.
So the question I’m left with is how do consumers prefer to make person-to-person payments? Cash is always nice, if you have it. If you’re like me though, you rarely carry cash. Do you prefer to write a paper check? Do you think about electronic options such as PayPal or an electronic funds transfer? Is that convenient for both you and the recipient?
I found this quote on the CashEdge product brochure for TransferNow Third Party
“ 79% of consumers are likely to use online funds transfer services to send money online to someone they know instead of writing a check, sending them a check via online bill pay, or using cash.”
– CashEdge Consumer Survey, 2008
Do you agree with this? Is it now socially acceptable to tell the baby-sitter that you’ll send them an electronic payment? Can ask little Molly for her email address so you can pay for those Girl Scout cookies?
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a few years back, my son was cutting lawns and one of his clients paid via a Quick Books account. It was a PITA for me to have to take these checks to the bank, and my thouht at the time was “Man can’t you just give him $20 in cash”.
I have used PP for a fantasy football payment, and guy that ran the league passed the transaction fee to us. I like PP and prefer it to a Credit Card for Internet purchases (especially small dollar purchases).
As much as I can I prefer to use cash for this sort of thing, I know that’s how I pay for most of the p2p stuff, and also for the girls’ school related things; failing that, I usually prefer a money order or check.
I use online bill pay for most of the recurring payments (not p2p), I’ve only used online bill pay to send a check payment a couple of times (p2p). In general, the online payment is too much of a hassle for single (non-recurring) payments. I only used paypal once for a p2p payment: the recipient was collecting money from multiple parties, and then needed to make purchases through paypal using that money; he requested that all payments be made through paypal, even though I would have preferred cash :), in this case, he also asked us all to pay the recipient fee that he would be charged.