July 6th, 2009
Do you bill a customer when it costs you more than whats due?
My bill each month for Amazon AWS web services is exactly $0.02. I have a self-hacked backup solution that runs through another cloud carrier. I use amazon for a few I/O calls a day – resulting in $0.02 in charges per month.
The question is, why do they bill me? Surely a CFO or smart board member realized that billing someone $0.02 actually costs them money. Merchant services charge flat fees + percentages for every transaction. This is usually something like $0.30 a 3.5%. I’m sure lower rates are negotiated by Amazon, operating on such a massive scale. But still, there is no doubt in my mind that Amazon spends more money on processing my payment than they make off me.
Another interesting scenario is when Comcast sent me a refund check for $0.24 inside an envelope with a $0.42 stamp on it. Why didn’t they just credit my account?
I wonder if any companies have policies where they just don’t bill clients when this happens?
