barnes and noble and paypal

[ricefields]

Not sure if anyone experienced this before and I only noticed this to be the case recently in the last month.

If you buy lego at bn.com and pay through paypal (along or in combination with gift card/kids dollars), you can avoid paying the 5% tax! Tested it twice and it worked.

Paypal will show initially the tax will be taken from your paypal account, but when comes to taking the money out, they only take the total without the 5% tax.

I am not sure what's causing this considering the address in my paypal account is showing my Canadian address. In the past I have changed it before when I make paypal purchases and having them ship to US but did not change it. Also paypal address not really needed as address would have been entered in the bn.com checkout page and these two addresses can be totally different as the shipped address on bn.com is the one bn uses.

example screenshot from paypal below (pasted as text). I was ready to pay $185.18 which included the 5% tax shown on bn.com order page. And paypal is authorized to take $185.18, but then it only withdraws $176.43. the difference is the 5% tax. It appears paypal cannot deal with the 5% tax and does not take it.

This is in contrast to paying using a credit card where the 5% does get charged. With this in mind I am going to make paypal and gift card payments only on bn.com.

Remember there is a promo to get $10 for $75 gift card purchase, and $5 kids club dollars are still being provided. Of course bn.com has severely cut off all coupons from being used on lego but there are a few lego sets still worth buying for Canadians. When all three of these conditions are combined, you can get about 22% off for $150 purchase of lego.

Original Order
Date Type Status Details Amount
Oct 25, 2014 Order To BarnesandNoble.com LLC Details -$185.18 USD

Related Transactions
Date Type Status Details Amount
Oct 25, 2014 Pending Balance Payment Placed Details -$176.43 USD
Oct 26, 2014 Pending Balance Payment Removed Details $176.43 USD
Oct 26, 2014 Express Checkout Payment Sent Completed ... -$176.43 USD
Original Order:
Total Payment: -$185.18 USD
-$176.43 USD


Total amount:
-$176.43 USD
Fee amount:
$0.00 USD
Net amount:
-$176.43 USD

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sales Tax:
$0.00 USD

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Invoice ID:
BN-825675990-010098729479022015002
Date:
Oct 26, 2014
Time:
22:47:35 PDT
Status:
Completed

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shipping Address:
No Address Provided

[legome]

what did you end up buying

[mcpheea]

Doesn't PayPal have a 5% promotion on right now at certain retailers anyway - I keep getting those emails but never really bother to open or read them...

[ricefields]

paypal had the 5% promotion; will have to see if I got the 5% off too. I already got the cash back from ebates.com, a measly 1% off.

[ricefields]

what did you end up buying

the above example was for 21050 architecture studio when it was available for $175. Once bn.com reduced their price to $160 a couple of weeks ago (to match shop@home), I returned that purchase and rebought it for $160. And again bn.com did not charge me the 5% tax on top of the $160 when I purposely tested my theory using paypal/gift card combination.

this is unofficially the 2nd batch of the set (after the first batch was sold out back in dec 2013). bn.com jacked up the price to $175 when it first got its 2nd batch while shop@home had it for $160 but I guess bn realized their evil way and reduced it to match shop@home