In the style of ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue’...
Some people confuse words with similar meanings. Take, for instance, the words ‘integrity’ and ‘ethics’.
‘Integrity’ means the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, whereas ‘ethics’ is an English county to the east of London.
Recently, we have been warned by Paypal that we would be suspended from their service unless we stopped selling Cuba Serrano Lavada coffee on our website. It seems, that whilst Paypal has no problems with processing payments for goods from many parts of the world with appalling practices of varying types, the USA/Cuba trade embargo from years and years ago is still in force. This means that they (being an American company) will not allow processing of Cuban products, and seeks to punish anyone who sells them by withdrawing their service.
I understand that the embargo was lifted during the Obama presidency, but re-imposed by his successor. The issue, seemingly, has not been addressed during the current presidency.
Suffice to say that we continue to sell Cuba Serrano Lavada coffee on our site, but as we have deleted the word ‘Cuba’ and called it ‘Serrano Lavada’ on the Paypal invoice, it no longer upsets their algorithms and the sales go through seamlessly.
We have now added another payment method to our website, so now you can change away from Paypal should you wish, by either using the option to ‘pay offline’ and send a BACS payment through your bank, or use the Wix Payment button to use your debit or credit card. If it helps you to decide, Paypal takes 3% of your money and sends us the rest. Wix takes 2.3% of your money and sends us the rest, and a BACS bank transfer has no cost to either of us!
Martin’s musings are not usually used for ranting. However, as a business, we work hard to maintain our integrity in all that we do, whether it be visible or invisible to others, and it is just so annoying that large, faceless companies can flout that intent with no fear of the consequences.