Re:PayPal starts charging 2.9% for refunded sales
by ShorsHammer on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @07:29AM
(#19857815)
Payment processing is not a free market by any stretch.
Re:PayPal starts charging 2.9% for refunded sales
by Tsubasachan on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @08:26AM
(#19858147)
Sadly in the US its creditcards or PayPal. Banking system is archaic as hell, no innovation in decades. The big American banks could digitalize and utterly rape PayPal if they wanted but why bother?
Re:PayPal starts charging 2.9% for refunded sales
by gbaygon on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @08:38AM
(#19858227)
what about stripe?
Re:PayPal starts charging 2.9% for refunded sales
by pmiller2 on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @09:23AM
(#19858555)
Can I really switch payment processors freely as a consumer? Or is my choice mostly to eat higher prices (^F “cost of doing business” to see my other comment), or not shop using PayPal?
Re:PayPal starts charging 2.9% for refunded sales
by mcv on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @07:20AM
(#19857768)
The free market is one aspect of capitalism. The concentration of capital which can be leveraged to undermine the freedom of the market is another.
Re:PayPal starts charging 2.9% for refunded sales
by gbaygon on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @10:57AM
(#19859402)
Isn’t the point of “disruption” so popular in startup culture to leverage the agility of smaller enterprises (and even a pitch used to rise capital) the tool to fight old paradigms? My point being that it isn’t “capitalism” fault, but that the markets are lagging behind the demand and it will fix itself eventually (again, see Stripe efforts in this matter for example).
Re:PayPal starts charging 2.9% for refunded sales
by mcv on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @11:16AM
(#19859589)
PayPal is long past the startup phase, though. They're a very well established player, and as such they have power they can leverage. A lot of people feel bound to use PayPal despite disliking the way they operate. That by itself is a sign of the market not doing what it's supposed to do in the ideal case.
Markets certainly don't always automatically fix itself. They require oversight and regulation, or else they tend to result in cartels and monopolies. The free market is great when it works well, but quite often it needs a bit of help.
It may be greed and lack of sight from PayPal side, but capitalism tends to adjust itself.