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Beware the phonecard offering more than 50% margin

I have heard of newsagents recently being offered a margin of more than 50% for physical phonecards. This type of margin is unsustainable. You run the risk of selling a phonecard which will stop working before your customer has used up all of the credit. You wouldn’t want to be at the shop if that happens, when they customer blames you for them losing money.

The only reason I could see a phonecard company selling phonecards with a retailer margin above 50% is because they are desperate for cash. While extra margin for your business might be attractive, there is a real risk that this short term cash gain could do harm to your reputation.

What if the phonecard company pushing the bonus margin cards runs out of cash? What if they shut down as a result? What if your customers are left without a working phonecard?

I know a bit about phonecard company margins and offer the advice in this post as a genuine warning to newsagents who may not know of the risk inherent in such an unsustainable retailer margin.

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  1. ERIC

    are you talking about early bird ph

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  2. Mark

    Eric I am talking about any physical card where you are offered a commission of more than 50%. Beware!

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  3. shauns

    Anyone else having problems selling phone credit today ? Telstra credit will only sell the higher price ones

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  4. Mark Faulkner

    Even the higher value vouchers are not available now

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  5. Mark Faulkner

    Still no Telstra Prepaid today apart from $70 and $200 vouchers. Just received a Touch email saying issue with recharge won’t be fixed until Monday. I smell something fishy though, because just went over the road to the local IGA and they have all Telstra recharge denominations available. What the!

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  6. Adrian

    we received an email from touch saying the Telstra pre paid vouchers are out of stock!!! How does an electronically generated product get out Of stock? WTF!!!!

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  7. Jim

    Had the same problem with e-pay as well so no mobile recharges for Telstra here today.

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  8. shauns

    Was working today but not yesterday ,but then again I only sold one

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