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Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

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Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#331

Consumers have an easy solution: pay with cash or check. Sadly, cash buyers will still pay the fees indirectly through price increases. The government could do some easy deregulation here and force vendors to expose the transaction fees to the consumer. Similar to gas stations : pay 3% more for Visa than cash. This will have a big impact on big ticket items like appliances. Truth is: businesses and government agencie…

Also, it’s kind of weird that we hand someone a piece of paper (a check) that has our account and routing number on it

Check fraud was significant . But overall finance fraud has seemed to increase despite improved security

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Double charges from taxi drivers is not possible as it's tapping or dipping your card and you are there for that (we are assuming some system that prevents someone stealing your card like biometrics or whatnot) You'd be surprised - at least in the public transit context with iOS Express Mode, double Apple Pay taps by transit systems have absolutely been recorded plenty of times. I admit I haven't heard about this i…

> To be honest, no, the idea that chargebacks are common in the US is a stereotype and not true. The thing is, even here on HN (where I expect, maybe not warranted, the level to be higher), people seem to absolutely proud and entitled to chargeback whatever for whatever reason. Those are almost 100% Americans (I check) and that is where I got the idea; this sentiment is much higher on tiktok, youtube, reddit etc. I e…

> The thing is, even here on HN (where I expect, maybe not warranted, the level to be higher), people seem to absolutely proud and entitled to chargeback whatever for whatever reason. Those are almost 100% Americans (I check) and that is where I got the idea; this sentiment is much higher on tiktok, youtube, reddit etc. I even saw some shorts of people screwing merchants with chargeback like it is some batch of honour.

That's an example of selection bias and other confounding factors: HN users are disproportionately American, Americans are more likely to know of chargeback rights than people from other countries, Americans are more likely to have credit cards than people from other countries, American statutory rights in this area (especially for credit rather than debit cards) are stronger than in most other countries, people who abuse chargebacks are more likely to be American than from other countries for all of the foregoing reasons, Americans are more likely to boast than people from most other countries, Reddit has disproportionately many Americans, and people who make shorts about chargebacks are more likely to do chargebacks than people who don't.

Consider statistical rather than anecdotal evidence in this area. According to one payments processing company, Clearly Payments, the USA has slightly below average chargeback rates, at 0.47%, behind the UK, Belgium, Germany, and France:

https://www.clearlypayments.com/blog/chargeback-rate-by-coun...

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Double charges from taxi drivers is not possible as it's tapping or dipping your card and you are there for that (we are assuming some system that prevents someone stealing your card like biometrics or whatnot) You'd be surprised - at least in the public transit context with iOS Express Mode, double Apple Pay taps by transit systems have absolutely been recorded plenty of times. I admit I haven't heard about this i…

> You'd be surprised - at least in the public transit context with iOS Express Mode, double Apple Pay taps by transit systems have absolutely been recorded plenty of times. Where? I heard it many years ago a few times but not for a very long time? Maybe it was a bug which got fixed?

It was common in NYC even a couple of years ago. Very likely it was a bug indeed, but unless there's a good technical reason why such bugs would only happen with merchants who can easily be reached to arrange refunds and who will routinely cooperate with those refunds, unwarranted double charges should be disputable via chargeback. (Naturally, not all double charges are fake - some are legitimately paying the same amount more than once. Being able to start a chargeback procedure doesn't prevent the merchant from showing the bank evidence that the charges were correct.)

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#334
The amount of money you make generally correlates to the amount of value you bring. With some exceptions and caveats, but it is the most fundamental role of money.

Go and make something at least 1% as valueable and I'm sure you'll find your 1% of the market share.

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mediation/arbitration It already works like that here (eu) for debit cards (which most people have; very few have credit cards although they don't know the difference). Double charges from taxi drivers is not possible as it's tapping or dipping your card and you are there for that (we are assuming some system that prevents someone stealing your card like biometrics or whatnot); products not as delivered is responsibi…

Keep in mind that card disputes are a thing even for debit cards. Credit cards may have higher protections by law that force the lender to eat the disputed amount regardless of the dispute's outcome, but the actual process of disputing a transaction is applicable to all cards - I've successfully done chargebacks on debit cards here in the UK.

I have done so too, but it is less automatic than on (some?) credit cards it seems. Lengthy processes and such.

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be honest, no, the idea that chargebacks are common in the US is a stereotype and not true. The thing is, even here on HN (where I expect, maybe not warranted, the level to be higher), people seem to absolutely proud and entitled to chargeback whatever for whatever reason. Those are almost 100% Americans (I check) and that is where I got the idea; this sentiment is much higher on tiktok, youtube, reddit etc. I e…

There's nothing wrong with using a right the card networks explicitly provide you. Even here on HN I see a huge tendency to play fast and loose with access to customer money, and corporation-on-consumer fraud has been normalized and is treated as no big deal. Chargebacks are a normal and expected reaction to that. I'm sure chargeback abuse is a thing, but in aggregate, I'd argue people are still not doing enough char…

> I'm sure chargeback abuse is a thing, but in aggregate, I'd argue people are still not doing enough chargebacks

But it only adds fees aka an extra tax; you are paying for it. Merchants just up the prices, banks up fees, conversion rates, etc etc. Someone is paying for it and it's always most likely you. The strange idea people have that 'this is free because it is law' is interesting. It is VCs (in neo banks), it is you in established banks. I rather do not pay for any of your chargeback behaviour really.

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the fraud hinges on the fact that all you need to drain an account is a static card number. A lot of hacks are subsequently piled on top of that to try and make it harder (SCA/3D Secure, captchas, etc), and a lot of busywork is spent tidying up the consequences of that (chargeback handling, etc). You could eliminate a lot of the fraud by moving off a mostly-static identifier to merchant, amount and time-limi…

You've described Bancontact, the standard Belgian payment system since the 1980's or so. I suspect most EU countries have similar stories. Paypal etc basically exist to deal with the backward underinvested USA payment systems.

But @oldprogrammer2 claimed it was just "innovation" and not create-a-problem, rent-capture-the-solution.

Now I'm confused. There's a better way, and other 1st world countries have already adopted it?

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason Facebook is printing money and X is not making any (and essentially never has). It's actually not the user generated content that primarily matters for ad revenue. Time spent on the site is necessary but not sufficient

> essentially never has Twitter generated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2023. That's a helluva money printing machine. About a fourth the size of Facebook's. I don't know how big yours is, but thats bigger than mine. The problem is that, even with such a big money printing machine, if it costs more to operate than it spits out, you don't make money. Twitters problem wasn't getting money, they were getting huge piles of…

You're saying meta had ~$14 billion in revenue in 2023? I think you're missing a zero...

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alarming rise in the incident rate of inappropriate chargebacks ("my fries were cold") really pisses me off as a sane user of contemporary credit card infrastructure. That is, I think of chargebacks as an absolute last resort; essentially a bulwark/ombudsman to protect me from bad actors. It should be used incredibly conservatively, and it should have significant reprocussions if it is used inappropriately; sort…

Reasonable people can disagree. What is a customer to do if they think a merchant is not a bad actor, but mistakenly refuses to refund their purchase? A chargeback seems like the fastest and cheapest option to resolve the dispute.

Only if you approach the domain with ignorance. It's very, very clear that chargebacks are not the play in most cases.

Re: Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with using a right the card networks explicitly provide you. Even here on HN I see a huge tendency to play fast and loose with access to customer money, and corporation-on-consumer fraud has been normalized and is treated as no big deal. Chargebacks are a normal and expected reaction to that. I'm sure chargeback abuse is a thing, but in aggregate, I'd argue people are still not doing enough char…

> I'm sure chargeback abuse is a thing, but in aggregate, I'd argue people are still not doing enough chargebacks But it only adds fees aka an extra tax; you are paying for it. Merchants just up the prices, banks up fees, conversion rates, etc etc. Someone is paying for it and it's always most likely you. The strange idea people have that 'this is free because it is law' is interesting. It is VCs (in neo banks), it i…

But I’d rather pay a small tax across everything rather than get stuffed for a much bigger amount.

Ideally, we’d have technical means to prevent people from getting stuffed (the oAuth-style token system I’ve described in other comments on this thread), combined with legal means to ensure businesses are discouraged from doing the stuffing in the first place (and those who do are promptly sued out of existence).

Until this happens, consumers (including me) will keep using chargebacks as their only way to defend their interests.

Also, if we were to magically rewrite the system tomorrow and eliminate card fees and the potential for chargebacks, do you really think businesses worldwide will suddenly lower their prices as a result? The market already demonstrated it is willing to pay the current prices, so the savings from lack of fees/chargebacks will end up in executives’ yachts instead or pissed away in more advertising.

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