A plea for fair play over rates
A Dublin reader is infuriated at the casual way online music store play.com seems to be taking advantage of Irish customers when it comes to exchange rates. “For the past six months I have noticed the euro/sterling exchange rate sliding wildly out of kilter with the actual current fx rates,” he writes.” I doubt Play doesn’t notice that they have been holding back the recent strength of the euro against sterling to their benefit,” he adds.
Last week, euro customers were paying nearly 12 per cent more than those who paid in sterling and he says he has seen it much worse than that. He wonders “how Play justifies this effective scalping of its euro customers.” The site doesn’t allow eurozone-based customers pay in sterling and take the credit card company foreign exchange rate which is, he says, pretty bad but a lot better than that offered by Play.
When he sent the company a mail asking for an explanation, he received the following. “Please accept our apologies for any confusion in this matter. Due to a higher processing cost on euro transactions and fluctuations in the exchange rate, there may be a difference in price when ordering in euros. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank you for your patience and valued custom.”
He was furious with what he calls a “lame justification”. He says he is “not at all confused about what is going on and wants to know how there are higher costs in transacting in euro as opposed to sterling or dollars? “The exchange rates on the site are now constantly incorrect in favour of the vendor by a good 10 per cent.” We got in touch with play.com to find out more about this “higher processing charge” on euro transactions and to ask why it did not allow its eurozone customers pay in sterling. A spokesman for the online retailer said the company prided itself on being “a value online retailer” and said it was “very competitive” in Ireland. He said pricing decisions were “based on a number of issues and in Ireland our prices reflect the costs of operating there. Indeed recently we have reduced our euro prices across the board to reflect the changing exchange rate”.
An expensive way to stand out from the mainstream masses
2:02 pm
And retailers wonder why downloading music illegally is so popular…
Comment by Paul