This guide will show you how to set up automatic credit card payments.
1. How to access the payment system
Go to the billing page on your account.
Click the Auto Top-up link to go to the page where you set up your payment rules.
2. Important information about your payment settings
1. Minimum payment to be taken from your credit card. The higher you set this amount to, the longer it will be before your next payment is taken from your credit card.
2. Minimum balance on your account. Once your account balance falls below this amount, a payment will be processed on your credit card. The amount taken from your card will be the amount set on option 1 above. If your account needs extra credit, this payment amount may be higher.
Examples of automatic payments
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Joe Smith has set his minimum balance to be $10, and his minimum top up amount to be $15.
At the start of this example, his account balance is $10 in credit.
After having Private Box scan some mail for him, which costs him $0.60, his account balance has become $9.40
Now that his balance has gone below $10, an automatic payment of $15 gets put on his credit card – the minimum top up amount he chose, so his account will now be $24.40
No more payment will need to happen until he goes back below $10
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Jane Doe has an account with Private Box, and she’s paying her rental for the mailbox yearly. As a Personal Mailbox customer, this makes her rental for the mailbox $99 per year.
Just like Joe, she’s got a minimum balance set to $10, and a minimum top up amount set to $10.
To start this example, her account is currently at $20 in credit.
Once her yearly mailbox rental came out – $99, her account balance becomes -$79
This means an automatic payment of $89 will be taken from her credit card, which will bring her account back up to $10 in credit. While her minimum payment amount was only set to $10, our system wants to make sure that the account does not remain in a negative balance. The minimum top up amount set isn’t enough to bring the account into a positive, so our account will take enough money from your credit card to bring the account to $10 in credit.
As soon as she has any mail processed, the fees for the service will take the account below $10 again.
Lets say that she has some mail scanned, which costs her $2. Her account balance will now be $8 in credit.
Because her account has gone below the minimum balance of $10, another payment will be taken. This time, because the account isn’t in a negative balance, the payment will only be the minimum payment of $10 – taking her account back to $18 in credit.
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How do I avoid lots of small transactions?
To avoid lots of smaller transactions if you get a lot of mail through our services, just set your minimum top up payment to be higher. That way your money will last longer before you reach that minimum balance on your account.
PLEASE NOTE: Always check to make sure your credit card details are up to date on our system. If it’s incorrect, we can’t take payment for our services.
If your account remains unpaid for 28 days, it goes into a suspended status. This is designed to let you know that your account is pending closure.
If there is still no payment made to top up your account after it has been suspended, your account will automatically close after a final 28 days passes.
Private Box will send you email notifications if your account goes into a negative balance and no payment is made to top the account back up, or if the automatic payment failed for any reason. We will continue sending a weekly notification if necessary, and will also send automatic warnings if your account approaches the automatic closure.
Automatic payment may fail for the following reasons:
- Insufficient funds – this means there was not enough credit available on your credit card to process the payment
- Expired card – this means your credit card has expired and the details need to be updated
- Bank declined transaction – this means the bank has prevented the payment from being processed. There could be many reasons for this to happen, but we do not have that information to say why. In these cases you need to contact your bank to find out why the payment was prevented, and could require you to contact the bank to enable payment processing.
If your automatic payments have stopped
If we have attempted to take payment from your card 5 times, our system will stop the automatic payments from trying again – there’s no point to keep trying when there have been so many failures.
You can reset the automatic payments and get them started again by making a manual payment to Private Box. Once there has been a successful manual payment, the automatic payments will start again when they are next due.