Well, we switched from Affinpay back to PayPal. It really wasn't an issue of which one was less expensive or not, rather it was about managing the organization much better. With Affinpay we were losing our ability to integrate with our accounting system (Quickbooks online connected through our bank account). We have everything setup to see all our revenue and expense categories in detail and take advantage of all the reports that Quickbooks has to offer. This was wiped out by using Affinipay. Now we are back on track.

We were using PayPal before, and have our accounting system linked to our bank account. All the transactions from PayPal, EMT, cash, cheques everything goes into the bank account then is streamed into our quickbooks online. It was a dream to work with. Now we get lump sums from Affinipay and have to unravel where they came from, and categorize every transaction manually. Why on earth would Wild Apricot choose this to develop on? It's a nightmare to deal with. I haven't tried Stripe, but suspect it gives us the same level of detail as PayPal without having to leave the website. I emailed product management with Affinipay and they were very polite, but basically there is no change that is coming.

I posted on this separately and have emailed WA on this a bunch. Their excuse is they have to pay developers to support third party payment systems so they are charging us more. That is ridiculous on the face of it. WA's costs increase so they just tack on a 20% to customers to cover their behinds. After seeing all the issues people are having with this "new integrated" system, we aren't switching. What worries me the most is this new system goes into your bank account to take out fees once a month. That is a horrible horrible way to do business. I'm not going to allow a company I know nothing about to go into our bank account and take money. WA should be ashamed of itself for forcing this on customers.

The AffiniPay platform has been pretty unpleasant to work with. Funky ways of accounting. Daily transfers. Higher charges. No balance report for reconciliation. Ugh. On the flip side, at least the AffiniPay UI is pretty decent.

Our organization was hit with a $0.28 fee during August, a month when we did no transactions. AffiniPay is refunding us because we called in, but we were only able to notice the error because there was no other data on the mailed statement. This is the 2nd fee error in 1.5 months of AffiniPay service. We have switched back to Stripe until they can work out the bugs and provide sufficient reporting such that we can verify we're being charged correctly. We need a fee-per-transaction report for this and for internal auditing purposes. The $0.28 may not seem like much, but with high volume, errors like this add up.

We didn't switch for these reasons. The fees appeared higher. I'm glad we didnt. Our organization is annoyed enough with the 20% PENALTY for not using a less mature payment processor.

You need to remove the penalty until you can prove that AffiniPay provides a better option.

While adding this feature please add the possibility to show the FEE amount as a line item in the invoice on each credit card transaction (Event Registrations, Store, Membership, etc.), increasing the total amount of the invoice by the FEE amount.

Their affiniPay charges seem very high for charities compared to PayPal and stripe. I pay 1.6% on PayPal and 2.2% on stripe. Or if I wanted to use PayPal Giving there are no charges. They also charge in Canadian dollars while this firm charges in US dollars. Why aren’t you competitive?

It bothers me that this was posted in April and in 3 months 1 wild apricot person asked a question. Can you say lack of customer support?

After seeing several posts with issues about AffiniPay, I think we'll take the 20% fee hit and avoid this horrible system all together.

We are a small non-profit and did the analysis of the AffiniPay fees. Even with the 20% penalty, PayPal is still a much cheaper option for us. At current transaction rates, the new system will cost us an additional 800 / year with very little benefit.

This is prohibitive.

Forcing us to go to AffiniPay has been a real fail and has not been a positive experience. I would say allowing us to go back to what we had without any penalty would be the only solution.

After further conversation with AffiniPay, the fees (for nonprofits) are theoretically as follows. I will have to verify on our next statement.

Visa / MC: 2.9% Processing Rate + $0.28 Transaction Fee + $0.02 Item Fee

American Express: 2.9% Processing Rate + $0.28 Transaction Fee + 0.15% AmEx Network Fee + 0.30% AmEx Card Not Present Fee

Discover: 2.9% Processing Rate + $0.28 Transaction Fee

There are additional fees if you are accepting international cards. There are additional fees if you are for-profit.

Correction for anyone reading my previous comment: AffiniPay support gave me the wrong information. They called me back hours later to state that the $0.06 extra was not in fact a card-not-present fee, but was the AmEx additional 0.15% fee. Not any better, but just want to share what the fee actually was about.

I agree that we should be able to see and export the fee per transaction. We need to be able to track the fees as an expense associated with different types of transactions, membership fee vs. specific event fees. I am concerned to read about extra fees in the comments below - fees that were not announced and are likely to occur. Since the advertised transaction fee was 2.9% + $.30 per transaction to use ON WILD APRICOT, then there should not be an additional $.06 fee for online payment. That strikes me as gross misrepresentation of the fees. Since we just started I suspect it will be a month or so before I even get a look at this on our account, and I am not pleased.

Yes, I agree you need to be able to see per transaction charges to appropriate to the correct account and class. Standard Non-Profit Account procedure, at least in the U.S.

We also need to see a breakdown of the fee per transaction so we can appropriately categorize the fees without doing complicated tracking and calculations each month. Stripe gave us this per transaction fee amount in their dashboard. AffiniPay doesn't even show the lump sum fee in their dashboard, only in their mailed statement.

Also, thankfully we only had one transaction in our first month, because the fee was not the expected 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. FYI for anyone switching to AffiniPay, there's a $0.06 fee for "card not present" charges, which are literally all Wild Apricot transactions. It's supposedly to provide increased chargeback protection because no chip was read. You must call AffiniPay to have them switch your setup to all "in-person" transactions so you're not charged this fee on every transaction. When I talked with AffiniPay they offered to refund the $0.06 so that was nice, but it shouldn't have happened without our knowledge in the first place. I asked if there were any other fees that hadn't been announced by WA and she claimed there weren't any except for international charges. We need a per transaction fee breakdown so that issues like this can be caught during months where there are many transactions and it's not clear which one caused discrepancies.

Sent to Affinipay
To whom this may concern,

After switching to Affinipay through Wild Apricot, we were surprised to find that you don’t take fees out before deposit. Unlike other payment systems, you debit the account of the cumulative amount on the 2nd of the month.

This wouldn’t be a problem if we knew ahead of time how much that fee is going to be.

To receive a paper statement in the mail on the 15th is not only after the fact - it’s a waste of paper and postage

As a consequence, we now have to enter all the data on a separate spread sheet - formulas etc. to calculate the amount.

When dealing with donation amounts of 5 - 10 K or more, and registration amounts of 1500.00 or more, we could be looking a fees in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars every month.

As the ED of this company, financial stability is our number one concern.

Without knowledge ahead of time as to what will be debited from the account on the 2nd - puts our finances (cash flow) at risk.

We need to know if you have plans to make this information accessible beforehand, how you’re going to do that and when.

If you cannot provide us with answers to these questions, we will be terminating our contract with Wild Apricot and moving to a platform where we can reinstate our old payment system.

Thank you - hope this helps. Not trying to be harsh - just to the point.

Michael Sigmann, ED www.tothegateway.org

We too would like to see the AffiniPay transaction fees showing up on every transaction so that we can separate these fees for every event. Please consider adding this information!

Do you mean that you lack information about commissions you have paid out for Affinipay service for the month?

I have a comment on Affinipay, the credit card processor you are encouraging all accounts to switch to avoid the 20% additional fee. We are a multi-client management firm and are currently using Affinipay for one account. The process of credit card payments works fine. The problem lies that Affinipay has no way to view my billing statement from them online. It took 4 emails back and forth to receive a statement to reconcile with my bank statement. Instead of an actual "invoice" or "statement", I finally received a print screen of the information. This seems a bit strange since the company can figure out how to process credit cards and produce information on those transactions to my account, but I have no access to a billing statement of their monthly fee.