141–150 of 305 posts
Well I don't really know what they do, but what I know is that Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €. All of them do the same : ensure I get the money from the customer. Of course it's a larger project to run this in the whole world, but shouldn't it scale to less along with the number of billions of customers instead of the other way r…
I remember reading a comment here a while back about merchants being offered a discount on the processing fee if they also transmitted detailed data about the purchase (essentially the data that would be on the receipt). That data could then be resold on to advertisers. Does anyone remember this or have links to more data? (Not having much luck with search, maybe I'm hallucinating the whole thing.)
I would love if it was transmitted to the bank for my own use so I can easily remember what I purchased or run budgeting software against it! Obviously wouldn't be excited about it being resold tho.
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I used to think "I should be nice to merchants" and pay everything in cash. That was 15 years ago. Now, living costs have gone up, I'm getting taxed to death by not just governments but increasingly more by businesses themselves ("benefits fees", "installation fee", "convenience fee", guilt-tip screens, sneaky price increases, etc.) so now I feel no guilt in playing the system to get at least some of my money back. N…
> I used to think "I should be nice to merchants" and pay everything in cash. That is only "nicer" as it allows to evade taxes. (Which some may consider nice) But cost for cash is comparable to card payment if looked at seriously * You need working time to count it * You need working time to bring to bank (or request pickup, which costs) * The bank will charge the deposit * The bank will charge for the change you nee…
Unless you're handling huge amounts of cash, cards are WAY more expensive to deal with IME, especially because the fees scale as a percentage of revenue, so you can't just increase sales and lower your margins.
I bought a cheap cash and coin counter for about $400 on Amazon, which means it takes me about 2m to count whenever I need to balance the register.
For reference, with my POS I pay about $400 per MONTH in card fees (square).
It does take time to bring it to the bank, maybe 5-10m a week for me.
My bank does not charge for deposits or change; this would be insane and I've never encountered this in the US.
Counterfeits aren't generally an issue for small bills in practice; for $20+ we use a 50c testing pen that takes about 2s per transaction.
Sticky fingers are easily caught by balancing the register after each shift which is again about a 2m operation with cash and coin counters.
Overall I would be taking home about $500 more a month if all my customers paid cash, which is a big deal for a low margin business.
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You have to wait for the investigation to complete to receive compensation if you’re hit by fraud on a debit card. Credit cards don’t share that issue. If you’re poor or living paycheck-to-paycheck, debit cards are potentially a risk to your livelihood.
As someone who has been hit with fraud on a debit card and a credit card, the process to recover money from fraud on a credit card is so much easier and more hassle-free than a debit card. The big difference is that with a debit card, it's your money that is hit by fraud. The debit card is basically just a proxy. You have to go file a police report. You have to hope the bank will give you the money back. When the cre…
They try to squirm out of that of course. But in general getting your money back isn’t too tricky even with a debit card.
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How are chargebacks resolved in this situation? This is an important question- most of the costs of a credit card providers come from dealing with fraud and chargebacks. That's partially because, under US law, credit card companies have to eat fraudulent charges if they can't get the person or company that did the fraud to do so. (Funnily enough, this is one of two places where protections for average people in the U…
You resolve it the same way you handle in-store cash purchases of products that turn out to be faulty. There is no reason why fraud and contract violation must be handled by unelected and unaccountable payment processor, when the government has already set up a consumer protection system for disputes related to cash payments. The payment processor is best left as a dumb pipe that does what parties and (in case of dis…
Because that would break the subscription-based billing model for a lot of businesses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think "I should be nice to merchants" and pay everything in cash. That was 15 years ago. Now, living costs have gone up, I'm getting taxed to death by not just governments but increasingly more by businesses themselves ("benefits fees", "installation fee", "convenience fee", guilt-tip screens, sneaky price increases, etc.) so now I feel no guilt in playing the system to get at least some of my money back. N…
> If merchants across the world make a deal with me to charge exactly the listed/advertised number exactly, no more, no less, then I'll pay in cash again. Where are you not getting this? You mean taxes on top of the retail price? You would pay cash, if the merchants colluded with you in evading taxes?
I play the credit card "game" because I hate feeling like I'm leaving money on the table, but I really wish I didn't have to. Some degrees of fees make sense, to run the network, and handle fraud, but it's ridiculous that people have this sense that shopping should somehow fund your vacation. Where I am it's increasingly common to see credit card fees when checking out. I get it, because merchants are being charged 3…
Some people are dumb and think tax refunds are free money when in reality they’re an interest-free loan to the IRS.
Money is fungible and instantly redeeming rewards for a statement credit is almost always the optimal way to use credit card rewards.
A person who wants to fund a vacation with rewards can simply redeem the rewards for a statement credit while simultaneously transferring that amount of cash to a HYSA or similar.
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You have to wait for the investigation to complete to receive compensation if you’re hit by fraud on a debit card. Credit cards don’t share that issue. If you’re poor or living paycheck-to-paycheck, debit cards are potentially a risk to your livelihood.
I've always had fraudulent debit charges automatically reverted. Typically the bank's fraud detection disables the card and you clear up the matter on the phone. Or they call you to verify if a suspicious charge outside your profile was actually yours. The banks aren't required to do this but they can choose to provide this level of service.
it is that different treatment of debit/cc fraud that pushes people towards high fee cc.
it is cc fraud protection that justifies high cc processing fees.
without cc fraud there is no need in visa/mc duopoly.
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This would explain why so many damn coffee shops dont deal with cash now - the double as a coffee shop and data reseller
Well, they still pay a fee, it’s just reduced. They primarily don’t deal with cash because cash is a pain. It needs to be physically taken to a bank and protected from theft by both staff and random robbers with guns, it needs to be counted all the time, and you need to maintain the right denominations to make change. I have reservations about businesses getting rid of cash, especially if they’re turning away people…
Some light self-promotion but also longer term thoughts: A large part of the promise of crypto and stablecoins was to displace Visa and Mastercard rent-seeking. This didn't seem to happen. Most modern neobanks, our own included ( https://peanut.me ), actually seem to EMBRACE Visa and Mastercard. Almost all offer an actual Fiat card within their app, instead of boldly saying "No, pay with crypto, the future of money!"…
It’s slow and expensive and doesn’t scale.
The real answer is an alternative that relies on a centralised provider - or set of them - who use traditional databases and the like, but do things in a modern efficient way and don’t charge the same fees as the current card providers do.