Chile Forum

To improve my negotiating skills with vendors who ask to be paid in cash, I am curious what a shop/store must pay when a purchaser pays them using Redcompra.

The reason I ask is:
My polola and I went shopping for chests of drawers today.
We found a shop selling a nice chest of drawers for CLP120,000.
We asked what the price would be if we purchased two.
They asked whether we would pay cash. (The fact that they asked tells me they prefer we pay in cash, and this has value to them.)
We answered "yes".
They offered to sell us two for CLP235,000; a measly CLP5000 discount.
My lovely polola, whose only deficiency is that she is too nice, accepted the offer without translating/telling me.
When she told me what occurred, I told her she should have feigned shock that the discount offered was so small in an attempt to bargain a larger discount.

So, what finance charges must Chilean vendors pay when receiving payment via Redcompra?
What finance charges must Chilean vendors pay when receiving payment via a credit card?

(We received an apparently fair-dinkim (true) boleta, so I am presuming there was no attempt to evade income tax by asking us to pay cash.)

I do not yet understand Spanish well.
Am I understanding correctly that the maximum which the vendor can be charged is 2.95% for credit cards and 2.5% for Redcompra?

Regardless of what the legal maximum is, what are merchants usually charged for each? This would probably require knowledge of someone who has been a vendor accepting credit cards and Redcompra.

Andres wrote:They offered to sell us two for CLP235,000; a measly CLP5000 discount.

In that case I would have taken them for 240.000 and paid with my card, that way he would have ended up with only 232.920
the problem is, people in this country would not understand if you tell him to think about his

Andres wrote: measly CLP5000 discount

first and use a calculater next time.
I used to walk out of places like that one in the biginning until I realized that all Chileans do "bright" business like that.

When I bought school supplies this year, the vendor offered an up to 15% discount for buying the whole school list at one place. When I picked up the items I asked about the discount, he told me it was, in my case, 12% for cash and 9% paying via RedCompra, because that was how much he would be charged (about 3%) by RedCompra.

For those wondering why I didn't get 15%, the vendors make special deals with certain schools, obviously my school didn't get the best deal. It is relatively small, so no big surprise there. This school-deal thing is a common practice, at least here in Serena, I assume other places in Chile as well.

The current credit card commission, as stated previously is 2.95% . With Debit cards the commission is determined on a yearly basis, and depends on the number of transactions processed by the vendor. The maximum for this current year is 2.25% , I get charged 1.86% currently.

If you want to haggle, fix the final price first, then pull out your card, chances are you have worn down the salesman so much that he will take it without complaining.

el puelche wrote:----What about when you go to buy a kilo of rice at $520= pesos per kilo and a 10 kilo sack right next to it for $6000=....its classic and yet they sell it because there are a lot of people that cannot figure out what 10% of 100 is or how far you will get going 60 kilometers per hour, or the guy near us who won't buy fardos for the going price where we are for 1800= each but brings them over from his other farm where the going price is 1500= and the freight is 200= per fardo and another 100= each to load, unload and stack-----plus he has to go watch it get done, watch it load and follow it over and hope that it does not rain for the 3 days it takes to do it-----but refuses to pay more where he is at----.

###

Compliments a widely used merchandising ploy in the U.S. designed to promote volume sales at higher unit prices; one ubiquitous example is: apples = 19 cents each, or 5 for a dollar. Apparently, gross margins are even higher in establishments whose merchandising managers watch/listen to Faux News.

patagoniax wrote:

john wrote:

el puelche wrote:----What about when you go to buy a kilo of rice at $520= pesos per kilo and a 10 kilo sack right next to it for $6000=....its classic and yet they sell it because there are a lot of people that cannot figure out what 10% of 100 is or how far you will get going 60 kilometers per hour, or the guy near us who won't buy fardos for the going price where we are for 1800= each but brings them over from his other farm where the going price is 1500= and the freight is 200= per fardo and another 100= each to load, unload and stack-----plus he has to go watch it get done, watch it load and follow it over and hope that it does not rain for the 3 days it takes to do it-----but refuses to pay more where he is at----.

###

Compliments a widely used merchandising ploy in the U.S. designed to promote volume sales at higher unit prices; one ubiquitous example is: apples = 19 cents each, or 5 for a dollar. Apparently, gross margins are even higher in establishments whose merchandising managers watch/listen to Faux News.

Perhaps you meant "complements" ??

Thank you.

You are quite correct, I did mean complements. Thanks for the correction. However, if I were a Faux News viewer, compliments might have been intended.

My polola's brother is co-owner of a bicycle store which accepts credit cards and Redcompra.
He said that the vendor's fee for both credit card and Redcompra ranges from 3% to 7% of the sale price, depending on the total volume of the vendor per month and the average value of their transactions.
He said their standard practice is to offer 7% to 10% discount for cash even though they pay only a 3% fee for credit card and Redcompra use.

Andres wrote:My palola's brother is co-owner of a bicycle store which accepts credit cards and Redcompra.
He said that the vendor's fee for both credit card and Redcompra ranges from 3% to 7% of the sale price, depending on the total volume of the vendor per month and the average value of their transactions.
He said their standard practice is to offer 7% to 10% discount for cash even though they pay only a 3% fee for credit card and Redcompra use.

discounts is going to depend where you go....

go to a owner operator shop, you can negotiate... go to a shop with employees... you cant... why,... they just dont have the power to do it, the owner doesnt let them because it would get abused... employers do not trust employees in chile to make discounts on their behalf...

its a trust and cultural issue...

to get the $5000 discount with a boleta... its probably the best you could of ever got!