Yeah, we've seen a lot of people sending CSC via the trades so I think that's caused the price to go up in user shops if you don't have a direct seller.

Not really sure how to fix that :/

Putting CSC (or gold accounts, etc) in the token / millionaire / etc shop doesn't actually lower the prices. People buy them up to hoard and almost never turn around and sell them.

You can use visa/mastercard/amex gift cards to buy them in the same way, stripe accepts them and you get the full value of the card :)!

Yeah, like I said, putting them in the MC / etc doesn't actually help. People (like you would!) buy them up and either use them immediately or hoard them for future usage. It doesn't help bring down the price of CSC at all, and the people who would typically buy CSC have a different avenue and maybe wouldn't spend as much RL $$ which obviously impacts us.

We don't want to keep adding prizes for buying CSC. You're getting what you're paying for - CSC. If we make it so that you'll only spend if you're getting CSC + bonus + cool item + extra items for the card, etc.

Neopets was owned by a massive corporation that could put neocash into stores, unfortunately we don't have the player base to make that viable.

Yeah, none of them really operate the same way as UGC or take insane fees. We legitimately cannot offer CSC at a point where we only get 30% of the charge, it just isn't sustainable.

Kickstarter actually just left using amazon payments and moved to stripe, because amazon payments takes a huge chunk (and also they're really hard to work with). The nice thing about stripe (and the reason we push it, even though we actually get charged a percent more than with paypal) is that we aren't beholden to anyone. Stripe just processes the cards, and thats it. You don't need a stripe account to make payments.

Believe me, I spend a lot of time looking for new and different ways to charge for CSC! Another one that people bring up a lot is a service that takes unused (or not completely used) gift cards and turns them into $$. The problem: for every $1 of gift card, we would have got $.10. Yes, that is more than we would get if that person wasn't able to buy CSC at all, but it's likely less than overall implementing the system, training UAs to be able to support users who use it, etc.

It's what we've observed in the past when we put things in the millionaire center (specifically gold accounts), people buy them up to save or use later, and the prices of them in user shops literally don't come down at all. Almost none of them purchased via the MC make it outside of vaults / inventories.

The same thing would happen with CSC. People would buy up the CWs/items that they've been eyeing forever but no one would sell the CSC in their user shop. Why get sP when you could actually get the items that you want?