Vodafone now charging you to receive a bill via post

Forums › One New Zealand (including Vodafone, WxC, Farmside) › Vodafone now charging you to receive a bill via post

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Geektastic

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#1112007 20-Aug-2014 12:56

I have not time to read all the pages of comments, so apologies if this has been said already!

Surely anyone in business requires paper records of bills paid (regardless of who printed them) for the purposes of company tax records? Or will IRD accept PDF's on disc now?

mattbush

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#1112103 20-Aug-2014 14:15

NzBeagle:
mattbush: By charging $1.50 per month without reducing your charges is simply increasing profitability. If they wanted to encourage electronic payment they would simply offer customers a discount for using electronic services.

Offering a discount is then an added cost to the business, so that doesn't really make much sense. Agreed it is an additional revenue stream, but it makes more business sense than offering a discount. As you said, costs are built into their current offering, so discounts would cut into revenue. Perhaps there is a better way of moving people off of letter invoices, but how do you most effectively persuade people, put a dollar figure on it.

Why would it cut into current revenue when electronic billing is deemed cheaper than paper mail???

NzBeagle

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#1112131 20-Aug-2014 15:13

mattbush:
NzBeagle:
mattbush: By charging $1.50 per month without reducing your charges is simply increasing profitability. If they wanted to encourage electronic payment they would simply offer customers a discount for using electronic services.

Offering a discount is then an added cost to the business, so that doesn't really make much sense. Agreed it is an additional revenue stream, but it makes more business sense than offering a discount. As you said, costs are built into their current offering, so discounts would cut into revenue. Perhaps there is a better way of moving people off of letter invoices, but how do you most effectively persuade people, put a dollar figure on it.

Why would it cut into current revenue when electronic billing is deemed cheaper than paper mail???

Difference between revenue and bottom line. Also, I don't think a shift of one customer would equal the same savings. There's probably some fixed and some variable costs, neither of which would probably equate to $1.50 per customer per billing cycle.

richms

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#1112347 20-Aug-2014 19:28

Since when has the cost of something dictated what you sell it for? They obviously feel that $1.50 is a fair price for the paper bill, which will be 1 or more printed pages put in an envelope and posted to someone. IMO the price is too low but that is what they have set it at.

I can see as the price to send a letter ramps up and up due to falling demand they will have to raise this price, but that isnt a major for a majority of their customers.

Richard rich.ms

mattbush

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#1113230 22-Aug-2014 08:26

richms: Since when has the cost of something dictated what you sell it for? They obviously feel that $1.50 is a fair price for the paper bill, which will be 1 or more printed pages put in an envelope and posted to someone. IMO the price is too low but that is what they have set it at.

I can see as the price to send a letter ramps up and up due to falling demand they will have to raise this price, but that isnt a major for a majority of their customers.

You must have some connection to VF.

r2b2

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#1113312 22-Aug-2014 09:50

mattbush:
richms: Since when has the cost of something dictated what you sell it for? They obviously feel that $1.50 is a fair price for the paper bill, which will be 1 or more printed pages put in an envelope and posted to someone. IMO the price is too low but that is what they have set it at.

I can see as the price to send a letter ramps up and up due to falling demand they will have to raise this price, but that isnt a major for a majority of their customers.

You must have some connection to VF.

Why? Just because someone agrees with a business doesn't mean they have a connection to them.

What people have to realise is that its not just postage costs that are involved in printing bills - there's a whole other infrastructure that needs to be paid for to get the data to the printer, for the printer to print it, for the bill to be enveloped, etc.

johnr

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#1113319 22-Aug-2014 10:03

mattbush:
richms: Since when has the cost of something dictated what you sell it for? They obviously feel that $1.50 is a fair price for the paper bill, which will be 1 or more printed pages put in an envelope and posted to someone. IMO the price is too low but that is what they have set it at.

I can see as the price to send a letter ramps up and up due to falling demand they will have to raise this price, but that isnt a major for a majority of their customers.

You must have some connection to VF.

No he does not in anyway!

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Free kids accounts - trade shares and funds (NZ, US) with Sharesies (affiliate link).

richms

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#1113636 22-Aug-2014 18:42

Thanks John. No connection at all other than knowing a few people from when I worked at ihug many years ago.

Just get annoyed at people thinking that hanging onto old tradition inefficient business practices is something that it's ok for others to subsidize.

Richard rich.ms

timestyles

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#1113649 22-Aug-2014 18:54

Our plans and services keep getting cheaper year after year and yet whenever we try an avenue of recouping costs or reducing them somehow, I'm always surprised at the number of people who accuse us of gouging. If the cost bothers you, there is a way to avoid it. Nothing could be simpler.

Let's face it: this is a price rise by some amount (I'm not sure it's $1.50, maybe 80c) by Vodafone. I (or Vodafone's CEO) would hope that annual profit increases by about $3-5 million (based on a guesstimate of how many VF users are on contract.

Linuxluver

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#1113679 22-Aug-2014 19:43

stocksp: So I got my normal bill today, which is all good. But hidden in there was a bookmark encouraging me to pay online and then Vodafone would donate to books in homes. Also fine.

However, on the back of the bookmark was a wee sentence saying that Vodafone was now charging $1.50 to send me a paper bill so I could pay them my $130 a month. What???? No letter, no change of contract, just a bookmark.

I quite like getting a bill so I can check for errors etc, and it does not get lost in the enormous amount of spam that comes thigh. For Vodafone to charge me to tell me how much I owe them, and in this cavalier manner ( no letter, no contract change) is just appalling. I won't be paying the additional amount, but will continue to pay them the amount for the service. If they don't want to send me a bill, then I won't pay them.

Simple

Yeah...Vodafone seem to be in "squeeze the stone" mode.

Not for me. I don't like it.

Use them less and less.

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Linuxluver

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#1113681 22-Aug-2014 19:45

richms: Yeah good luck with that.

Why should they incurr the costs of printing and posting a letter to you and not most other people?

They also charge you to pay online.

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ajw

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#1119551 1-Sep-2014 13:01

Signed up online to receive emailed paper bills. I thought it wouldn't be a straight forward operation as I have had to chase vodafone up again to send me a emailed bill.

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