Payments

JustinRSD · ‎May 02, 2021

@DebSheenD wrote:
We had to review our pricing strategy due to industry alignment. We always strive to provide efficient, reliable, and easy to use payment services. To make this happen, we had to set the new fees so we can continually make investments to maintain and improve the product.

I am also looking forward to discussing the situation with you and answering any questions. Feel free to reach out to me anytime.

Deb - Thank you for just saying what all of us know (but which Intuit hasn't seemed willing to say): WE RAISED THE FEES BECAUSE WE THINK THE MARKET WILL PAY IT.

You could go further and say, "The Payments group needs to hit our revenue and growth numbers like Tax and Small Business and Mint and the other groups have to ... And this is one way we're doing it."

That's fine. Ya'll gotta do what you need to do to keep your jobs. It's not something that some of your customers will accept, but speaking truth at least treats us as intelligent people instead of people you're trying to spin.

So, I'll treat you with the same respect: The reason this is important, and won't just go away, is that many of us are not retail merchants. In retail, CC tx fees are normal and generally small. Many of us are not struggling solo small shop owners. We're used to waiting days or weeks to get invoices paid, so 1 day deposits provide no value to us. We aren't opening flower shops or selling bikes or selling cute cupcakes -- the dominant customer profiles you and your Product and Marketing team are using internally to think about your customers are just weirdly wrong. The "Intuit Giants" minifilm is indicative of this. The example business owners at QuickBooks Connect are indicative of this. Ask yourself this: why are (almost) all the FMHs that your employees do involving small retail merchants? Why is that what you always use in D4D exercises? I'll speculate that it's because it's easy to find them, and because it's easy to describe their business on a slide, and because it makes employees feel good to think they're helping the owner of a cute little corner shop.

Those of us criticizing this change are generally not that type of business owner. We're still small, so we're wearing a lot of hats. We're working on the business by typing this response at 6am on a Sunday. We're conscious of every dollar in unnecessary costs because we're giving up time with our kids to make the business run while expecting one day we won't have to. We're investing in our own thing so we won't have to rely on someone else giving us a job and telling us what to do later. We don't accept credit cards because we want to keep costs low so we can compete and still make a profit. And so, when Intuit says "We're going to take 1% of your revenue" it's just... We go into slay-the-dragon mode.

Re: "industry alignment": yes PayPal and Square and other large tech companies like Intuit charge around 1% for stand-alone ACH payment processing. Maybe the Payments Group sees them as peers and thinks "If they can do it, so can we." But we don't see payments as a standalone product - it's core to what makes QBO valuable to us. We're paying for software to use double entry accounting for our businesses, not relying on Venmo's UI. Payments is not a product - it's a feature to hook us into the QBO ecosystem.

And one other thing: Melio. You INTEGRATED it deep into QBO. They offer FREE incoming and outgoing ACH invoice payments. How can you say "industry alignment" when your own product offers free ACH from an industry peer?!

I know this is getting long, but you seem like someone who can actually engage on the topic thoughtfully. I love the idea of QBO as "operating system" of small business (and my business). I want to put it at the center and grow with it. I want to be successful and see Intuit continue success as well. I'm an owner of INTU stock. But, this "1% of revenue" thing is wrong in so many ways. And mostly it just makes me sad that I have to spend time moving away from software I want to love. We moved $15k in revenue off of QBO Payments to a different ACH provider in April. We'll do the rest this month. We started using SurePayroll instead of Intuit Payroll. We moved to Clockify instead of QBO Time. It's the realization that Intuit isn't really there for us, and so we have to go elsewhere, and the understanding that I can't really make QBO the center of the business. That's the frustrating part -- I want to, but feel like you're an unwilling partner.

It's ok - it's just business. But, I'm hopeful that you'll share this with the front line Product Managers and Directors for an unfiltered view from a customer. And, it's never too late to correct mistakes. Flat fees for ACH, at some level, is the correction here.