Pay Venders with Postal Money Orders?
The short answer is no, here's why.The US Postal Service sells International Postal Money Orders for USD 3.00 for some countries and USD 7.50 for others.
USD 3.00 = Canada, Japan, Mexico, and others.
USD 7.50 = Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, Greece, Ireland, Isreal, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and many others.The limit of a postal money order is USD 700.00 except for the UK (USD 200.00) and Norway (USD 400.00). As of March 1996 Kagi is paying out over USD 100000.00 each month and lets estimate that half of that goes to people outside of the US.
There are four reasons why this is not a viable payment method in our opinion.
The first reason is employee safety. Carrying USD 50000.00 in cash from the bank to the post office on a monthly basis just does not seem like a good idea. It would not take long for someone to figure out what was going on and to rob the employee. You cannot buy a US postal money order with anything other than cash.
Issuing payments in this way is very labor intensive and for many authors, multiple money orders would need to be purchased. Just creating and mailing these postal money orders could take hours.
The USD 7.50 money orders are not available at the post office. Instead, you purchase them at the post office and they eventually mail the money orders to you so that you can mail them outside of the US. This could easily add a couple of weeks of delay to the payment cycle.
Finally, I have no idea what the process is for dealing with a postal money order that has been lost or stolen. I presume that a Postal Money Order is the same as cash and thus if it is lost or stolen, there is no recourse, the money would be gone. This is not true for checks.
Based on this research, it doesn't look like paying authors via postal money order is a good idea. Other payment methods will be researched later.
Modification Date: Wednesday, April 10, 1996