Either the merchant agreements forbid charging credit card fees, or it's just a norm that our businesses have adopted (over here we strongly believe in the advertised price being the actual price - we don't have tax-added-on-afterwards or mail-in rebates like in the US), but either way you very rarely get charged a fee directly. Some places will have a minimum spend to pay by credit card, and low-end shops won't accept Amex because their fees are higher, but for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even if you're paying cash.
> for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even if you're paying cash.
That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer shops that don't.
Remember cash isn't free either - armoured cars and the like cost money, I wouldn't be surprised if the overall work involved in handling cash ended up being more costly than card fees.
I guess I don't object in principle to a cash discount (a card fee would annoy me), but those tend to exist for the sake of tax evasion, which I won't support.
>I wouldn't be surprised if the overall work involved in handling cash ended up being more costly than card fees.
This is definitely the case for the underlying costs as you can imagine. Doing an online transaction is much cheaper these days than operating trucks, cash sorting, etc. It's however not always the case that banks will charge merchants less for cards than for cash handling unfortunately. This has maintained the weight of cash as a payment method past it's actual usefulness.
It's part of the merchant agreement not to charge a different price if using a CC (though it's common to offer a cash discount even if it does violate their agreement).
>There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine.
Do you have an example? Debit cards have very similar cost structures, cash is more expensive to handle.
Lastschrift works fine for me.
And you can use that to buy goods online? Direct debit is usually used for recurrent billing. In Portugal there's a way to use a similar system for online purchases by generating a code that you then have to use in an ATM or online banking. It makes for a pretty poor customer experience when purchasing and I doubt it's actually cheaper these days than debit/credit payment processing.
Re:Talos II
by CrystalGamma on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @02:02PM
(#14960635)
Amazon certainly accepts payments that way.
And many other online retailers offer GiroPay, which I think is a payment method based on SEPA Credit Transfer. I don't know about the cost structure of that one.
There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Thankfully not every country is already majorly infected by credit cards.