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> If you pay with your bank account’s debit or credit card, you don’t see those merchant or interchange fees itemized anywhere either. But arguably you should

> If you pay with your bank account’s debit or credit card, you don’t see those merchant or interchange fees itemized anywhere either. But arguably you should - most people have no idea that they’re paying a large tax on all their card purchases to private companies. In fact, if these charges were actually appended to the bill, I reckon we’d see proper competition in this space, as users would be incentivised to choose the lowest fee option. Unfortunately EEA legislation has gone in the opposite direction and processing surcharges are no longer allowed, largely due to merchants taking the piss and making up surcharge numbers (but I’d also suspect some lobbying went on by payment processors here too, since this it’s in their interest to hide their fees). This effectively means that customers are incentivised to use their Amex (which charges stupid fees to the merchant) and everyone ends up subsiding Amex users because prices must increase across the board to compensate.

kube-system 6y ago
Some of this stuff is reaching the limits of practicality. Many of the costs that a business might incur when doing business are non-linear with respect to a single sale and/or undefined at that point in time. If a payment processor charges (made up numbers): * $100/month/account * $250 flat hardware cost per POS * $50/month/POS * $0.30 + 2.9% per transaction for the first $10k transactions per month * $0.25 + 2.5% per transaction for all transactions after $10k per month * $50/hr technical support ... then what do you put on any given receipt?
- GeneralTspoon 6y ago
  Only the per-transaction costs are relevant. Just like VAT, you don’t include that you had to pay a VAT registration fee and accounting costs of X per year to process it. Agreed that it does become complicated when you have multi-tiered fee structures like that though.... Also the fact processors charge different amount to process payments from different countries. It definitely needs some thought - but the current state of things is not an ideal place (users incentivised to use expensive and inefficient payment solutions while private corporations siphon off large amounts of money from the economy just for the privilege of being able to move money around).

kube-system 6y ago

Some of this stuff is reaching the limits of practicality. Many of the costs that a business might incur when doing business are non-linear with respect to a single sale and/or undefined at that point in time. If a payment processor charges (made up numbers): * $100/month/account * $250 flat hardware cost per POS * $50/month/POS * $0.30 + 2.9% per transaction for the first $10k transactions per month * $0.25 + 2.5% per transaction for all transactions after $10k per month * $50/hr technical support ... then what do you put on any given receipt?

GeneralTspoon 6y ago
Only the per-transaction costs are relevant. Just like VAT, you don’t include that you had to pay a VAT registration fee and accounting costs of X per year to process it. Agreed that it does become complicated when you have multi-tiered fee structures like that though.... Also the fact processors charge different amount to process payments from different countries. It definitely needs some thought - but the current state of things is not an ideal place (users incentivised to use expensive and inefficient payment solutions while private corporations siphon off large amounts of money from the economy just for the privilege of being able to move money around).