Do main dealers accept credit cards for buying a car?

[daemon]

Buster73 said:

I'm in retail , my current card charges nett down to well under 1% , I've just checked the last statement and it's actually .6%

I charge nothing extra for any card payments , I certainly wouldn't want to be upsetting my customers for the sake of a few bob , I want customers to keep on returning and absorbing a .6% nett charge is a very small price to pay.

Even at 1% its still £100 on a £10,000 transaction, which could be 10% of your gross margin on a car at that price or may 20% of your net margin.

Relatively speaking with bigger transactions its a lot to give away.

[VolvoT5]

Buster73 said:

I'm in retail , my current card charges nett down to well under 1% , I've just checked the last statement and it's actually .6%

I charge nothing extra for any card payments , I certainly wouldn't want to be upsetting my customers for the sake of a few bob , I want customers to keep on returning and absorbing a .6% nett charge is a very small price to pay.

I'm guessing most retail has much higher margins than car dealers though.... it is going to be a lot easy to give away 1% to please the customer if your mark-up is 50% or whatever.

[daemon]

VolvoT5 said:

I'm guessing most retail has much higher margins than car dealers though.... it is going to be a lot easy to give away 1% to please the customer if your mark-up is 50% or whatever.

Particularly on a relatively small transaction when its going to amount to a matter of pence

[anonymous-user]

whoami said:

speedyguy said:

whoami said:

Vipers said:

Oh well, must be a big difference, thanks for the clarification......................

There is.

Debit card = Free.

Credit Card = 3%.

Source ?

"Source" of what?

Thinking about it are they the fees to the retailer or the customer??

Supermarkets don't charge for credit or debit cards, Travel agents/cheap airlines generally do for credit cards ?

What context are your 3% and free for ???

[daemon]

speedyguy said:

Thinking about it are they the fees to the retailer or the customer??

Supermarkets don't charge for credit or debit cards, Travel agents/cheap airlines generally do for credit cards ?

What context are your 3% and free for ???

Typically that has been what retailers have been charged for processing transactions. I remember it being 2.2% or something when i'd a retail business some years ago.

Retailers pretty much chose to absorb it, and i think the big players like supermarkets get big discounts anyway.

The problem for car dealers is, the transactions can be very large and the margins are very slim - so if a customer has negotiated hard and on the day of handover whips out his credit card to pay, it might be difficult for the dealer to absorb maybe a £300-£400 charge, thus they pass it on to the customer.

[whoami]

speedyguy said:

Thinking about it are they the fees to the retailer or the customer??

Supermarkets don't charge for credit or debit cards, Travel agents/cheap airlines generally do for credit cards ?

What context are your 3% and free for ???

What a main dealer will typically charge you for each type of transaction.

[Granfondo]

daemon said:

VolvoT5 said:

I'm guessing most retail has much higher margins than car dealers though.... it is going to be a lot easy to give away 1% to please the customer if your mark-up is 50% or whatever.

Particularly on a relatively small transaction when its going to amount to a matter of pence

It's all relative!

[acer12]

% depends on the card. Typically cards which give rewards to the card holder have a higher retail % (eg amex who have very good card holder rewards = 3% retailer, hence why not widely accepted outside of US & large retailers in UK). Company credit cards also have high %s (up to 3%).

[daemon]

Granfondo said:

daemon said:

VolvoT5 said:

I'm guessing most retail has much higher margins than car dealers though.... it is going to be a lot easy to give away 1% to please the customer if your mark-up is 50% or whatever.

Particularly on a relatively small transaction when its going to amount to a matter of pence

It's all relative!

Well said, Captain Obvious.

[btcc123]

rix said:

Yes, its a car I want (rather than need). No I can't afford it insofar as cash in the bank, but I can afford the depreciation/interest. That's a choice which I'm happy with. FWIW my Monaro has definitely appreciated in value since i bought it but it certainly wasn't bought with that in mind - neither will this car!

The intention would be to buy on a new credit card with upto 20 or so months interest free on new purchases, then if I needed longer to pay it off, would just transfer the balance to a new card at a minimal fee. If I could do this I'd save a good £2000+ in interest over two years.

If you bought a car on a new credit card the garage would probably charge you 3% and then when your interest free period finished you would have to pay another 3%.This is not a minimal fee when you can get a bank loan at 3.5% that would be a better option.

[anonymous-user]

whoami said:

speedyguy said:

Thinking about it are they the fees to the retailer or the customer??

Supermarkets don't charge for credit or debit cards, Travel agents/cheap airlines generally do for credit cards ?

What context are your 3% and free for ???

What a main dealer will typically charge you for each type of transaction.

So you mean retail fees, I pay 1k for a car you want £30 card charge, I pay £30k and you want £900 charge, which could be all your margin.
If only that was clear at the start

[MrBarry123]

v8250 said:

You'll find Mr Tidy's not relating to a value gaining asset, a house. He's referring to a continuously decreasing asset, the modern car...especially one that's financed to the hilt and will be worth 50% of showroom value in a few years time. Excluding classic/period/historic cars there are very few, if any, cars that hold their value. I have never understood why someone would want to be borrow money, irrespective of how it's financed, on a constantly decreasing asset; it is sheer madness. Excluding the main family home, if you can not afford something, do not buy it.

Re' your observation 'in your world this country and most developed countries would be in a far worse state than they are currently'...this would not be the case. If nation individuals and national Govt's had shown considerably greater financial prudence than they have done over the past 30-40 years we would not be in the st of inescapable financial st that we're in today. Today, the UK's in debt by £1.6bn...that's 82% of GDP and we have no way of paying this debt...in the same way most car drivers who borrow money to buy a car they simply can not afford have no way of ever affording to buy a car they 'want'. It is incredulous to believe that so many people are happy to 'piss-away' their hard earned monies to pay the salaries of finance company employees in order to have a new car on the driveway.

Edited by v8250 on Sunday 28th June 08:25

Edited by v8250 on Sunday 28th June 08:26

Ah yes, you mean the appreciating assets that are artificially propped up by government and have been in some shape of form since the late 70s? The same assets that when st hits the fan, like in 2007, everything goes bad and a lot of people end up in negative equity with these "appreciating" assets to a value far more than your typical car? The same asset where they will take a couple's salary as a way of means testing, even though likelihood says that one half of that couple will end up, at some point, not earning what the means test has assumed they will for the entire period the mortgage is in place?

Yes, wonderful. Absolutely fantastic.

I'd much rather be in a rented house with a £20k car that is financed than mortgaged to the hilt (95% mortgages - WFT!?) with a £5k car purchased outright however at the risk of a 10% drop in housing prices and/or a 1%+ increase in mortgage rates causing my financial doom to a value far larger than the majority of car finance agreements.

People's financial decisions are people's financial decisions - neither is right nor wrong. The people who make the argument you make above i.e. all debt but mortgages are bad, are usually middle-aged (or older) people who have benefitted from the silly growth* in house prices since 1980 (minus the slight blip in '89/'90), caused primarily by a lack of stimulus for house building, Right to Buy schemes and low interest rates since 2008.

*I'm not in any way jealous because my parents are firmly sat in this group of people whose houses' value have increased at a rate well beyond inflation.

Normal people (i.e. those who never set out to strategically invest in property) who are now sat on large equity piles in their homes aren't clever people who are savvy with their money - they've purely benefitted from successive monetary policies introduced by governments of the UK to stimulate growth primarily in the housing prices (mainly of the South given the London effect) to drive towards a visible "upturn" in the UK's economy.

To summarise, I'm not saying you're wrong as I accept house prices are continuing to rise however...
a) It's short sighted to believe this will continue which means those with mortgages will at some point suffer. If house prices pull away from earnings as much as they are expected to in the next few years, people will not longer be able to afford mortgages and if there's no demand within the market at the market price, the result is the market readjusting in-line with demand. The net result of this is a reduction in house prices and the confidence in the market being eroded, equalling market instability - good for neither buyer not seller.
b) Those who are benefitting from increasing house prices are, most likely, doing so out of luck and therefore are not in a position and/or qualified to criticise other people's financial decisions.

Anyway... To answer the query... Yes, OP, the dealer should accept credit cards however may include a surcharge of 2-3% for the privilege.

[Ste1987]

lukefreeman said:

I'm sure I read somewhere you can hook up your credit card to a paypal account.......Could you payapl gift your missus the cash, and just pay off her debit card

Would that work>

Worse than the dealer actually, found this on Paypal:

Paypal said:

Free when funded by the sender’s PayPal balance, bank account or debit card. If you use a credit card to send money, a fee of 3.4% + 20p applies.

[rix]

Well it turns out the answer is no... Not for any fee etc, just no. The said dealer has an internal CC limit of £2000...

[nickfrog]

shake n bake said:

v8250 said:

Remember, it's the cash buyer who controls the deal...in the same way the finance company controls your deal.

You have seen way too many we buy any car adverts and bought the hype. Cash buyers do not get better deals, quite the opposite.

Well not really. A cash buyer can get the Finance incentive and payback instantly, without fees.

[laters]

rix said:

Well it turns out the answer is no... Not for any fee etc, just no. The said dealer has an internal CC limit of £2000...

There might be a way round that though.
A lot of cards are offering interest free deals on all sorts of offers including balance transfers.

When I got my new car earlier this year I didn't quite have enough saved and the seller had no card facilities so I did a balance transfer.
Suppose it depends if the card offers the balance transfer for enough for the car, I could have bought a more expensive car but the one I found is what I wanted.

Worth looking into if its something you really want.