181–190 of 237 posts
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In US sales tax is made visible, i.e. it is not included in the listed price. And first thing foreign visitors do is complain about this.
That's not what visible means. Visible means a breakdown. List price should always include all fees.
I know this is in the EU, but do yourself and the businesses you love a favor. Pay with CA$H. The value you receive from local small businesses is worth the time it takes to avoid the tax on our economy.
I don't know why Stripe is taking a percentage on top of the normal processing fee, I'm guessing it's to deal with percentage differences for people paying using credit cards. There are many cheaper alternatives out there if Stripe is getting too expensive.
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"because high interchange + cashback creates a nasty regressive tax" There's an interchange surcharge for rewards cards. Stripe bundles this all together to make the pricing simpler.. but most merchants use traditional merchant accounts, and they are charged based on the type of card used. Edit: For example, here's visa's interchange fees: https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...
Doesn’t really change anything. VISA and Mastercard rules also prevent merchants from discriminating based on card type, either you except all VISA/Mastercard cards, or you except none. So the exact manner in which they’re billed to merchants is kinda irrelevant, the cost ends up being spread over all consumers, regardless of their ability to recover the money via cashback or rewards.
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I assumed it was mostly to pay for chargebacks and fraud. What I think is crazy is basically anything On a $1 itunes song it would have been an >30% cut, you can forget about selling any small digital thing worth less than that.
Why wouldn't small items have chargeback costs? Do credit cards ban chargebacks for them? If someone buys something cheap, it doesn't come, and the credit card company refuses to allow a chargeback, that's going to make some customers mad.
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> This is big part of the reason you don’t see high value reward cards or cashback program in the EU. Interestingly my US 1.5%-3% (regular, also 5% special) cashback cards keep paying out on transactions here in the EU. I've always wondered who is losing out in that equation.
You probably pay for it with the exchange rate spread. Your card may say no foreign transaction fees but they're already taking a 3% profit margin on the currency conversion.
For credit card, I have tried this with Bank of America, Chase, and AmEx. For debit card, I tried with Schwab. And in all cases, I checked the currency exchange rate, and it was very close to the spot rate.
Where you do get hammered is by international merchants, who ask if you want to pay in local currency or USD (if you are American I guess). You should always choose to pay in local currency (meaning the merchant requests the payment in local currency from your card), because your credit card issuing bank will give you a much better currency conversion rate than the merchant will.
If you say you want to pay in USD, then the merchant will calculate a USD price that is much higher than the local currency price.
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I assumed it was mostly to pay for chargebacks and fraud. What I think is crazy is basically anything On a $1 itunes song it would have been an >30% cut, you can forget about selling any small digital thing worth less than that.
on the contrary, smaller transaction amounts are prone to MORE chargebacks because they are attractive targets for card testers
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Given any problem, someone will find use of authority as the answer.
Solving coordination problems through voting. Something as fundamental as the payment system should have people competing on making the underlying processes more efficient, not building the biggest network lock in effects.
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It's not even slightly how it works, and your interpretation is correct, so long as the customer has consented then you're fine. The issue with Google Fonts and Analytics is that the customer has very rarely consented to tracking (particularly with fonts), and in a great many cases even where there is a "I consent to tracking cookies" dialog the cookies were dropped before it was displayed.
Sick of those stupid dialogs.
I have been pondering transaction costs lately. Seems like this is an area where intervention could have massive impact: these costs are effectively a tax that incurs deadweight loss so according to prevailing economic theory if we can reduce it the whole economy should be catalysed. IIUC governments already introduce price caps for certain elements of this market but I think we could be doing more? Like mandating in…
I don't see a reason something as critical as transaction networks should remain privatized, it should be operated by society (via democratic government), not private interests. We don't have private corporations operate highways or the federal mail system. They may operate (heavily regulated) airlines, but not the traffic control that manages their interactions. Imagine having to pay a "takeoff clearance fee" or a t…
In Portugal, the mail company is private and 90% of the highways are operated by private companies. And this is a country where the Socialist party has been in power for 20 of the last 30 years.