Subscription questions
Frequently asked questions about subscribing to Englewood Edge
Englewood Edge - Englewood Florida's own online daily newspaper
Welcome to the Edge
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Is it safe to use my credit card online?
There is risk, but it’s probably no more risky than using your credit card in a store. All our transactions are made through Paypal and are secured with the best encryption software available to consumers. This scrambles the data so that it can only be read by you and by Paypal. This is how all e-commerce is done. Most of the risk with e-commerce comes not through making purchases but from other angles, such as deceptive emails from scam artists tricking you into giving them your credentials. You should know that we at Englewood Edge will NEVER ask for your credit card information in an email, and we will NEVER ask for your Paypal credentials for any reason. So long as you are careful whom you give those credentials to, you’re probably safer than you are using your credit card in a store. When was the last time a cashier actually checked your name and signature to see if it matches what’s on your card?
The bottom line, though, is that all credit card transactions are protected by the Electronic Funds Transfer Act of 1978. Even if your credit card information is somehow stolen online, you are not liable for fraudulent charges, so long as you report fraudulent activity to your creditor as soon as possible. The exception is if your card is physically stolen and you don’t report it right away. For full information, do a web search for “Electronic Funds Transfer Act”.
Why does Paypal need a separate password?
Paypal, being such a large facilitator of financial transactions, has had to implement a lot of security to keep fraud at bay. When you sign up for a recurring monthly payment and you don’t already have a Paypal account of your own, a monthly payment profile is created instead. Think of it as sort of your signature on the subscriber agreement: as long as that payment profile remains active, your subscription stays on. No one can access it to make changes to your billing info (such as address and credit card number) but you. You can cancel it at any time. We can access it only to see that payments are being made and who they’re being made by. Even we don’t see your credit card number.
Who is Paypal and how are they involved?
Paypal is an electronic funds transfer company that was born in the early days of the consumer internet. They exist to make it easy for small businesses and individuals to make or receive payments online. Since they started out, they have become massive, and in 2008 $60 billion worth of funds moved through Paypal’s system. Their system accounted for 15% of all e-commerce in the US that year. If you’ve ever used the world-famous internet auction site Ebay, which owns Paypal, then you’ve probably already sent funds through their system. We use them because we’re a small company and that’s what Paypal’s made for. All of us at Englewood edge are involved either in producing news stories or keeping the website running. We have no billing staff. We have Paypal take care of that for us.
Why can’t it be free, like bigger news sites?
Bigger news sites often are connected to a print newspaper or a TV station that sells lots of ads over a broad area. Bigger news sites that are not connected to print or TV — Huffington Post, Salon.com, Politico.com — are national and international sites that have millions of readers and sell millions of dollars worth of ads. They can pull in advertising from big business, major electronics producers, energy companies, and the like. Those ads are used to pay the staffs that write and edit and post the news. Even then, many of those websites are losing money, and are kept running that way only because it brings new readers to a larger enterprise. Englewood Edge is independent, has a much smaller reader-base, and the Englewood business community, as we all know, cannot afford a lot of advertising. But our staff still works very hard and needs to be paid to collect, write, edit and post the news. Just as you would pay for a printed newspaper to land in the puddle in your driveway, we need you to pay for EnglewoodEdge.com to be at your fingertips whenever you want the news.