The problem in Australia was bank cards used to be the standard of electronic payment using eftpos as the gateway to debit from the bank. Late mid 2010's banks started to flog a visa debit card ... which additionally allowed a person to make over the phone or internet credit type payments - if they didn't already have their own credit card from elsewhere. At some point some retail stores started to drop eftpos for processing - unsure if visa debit was cheaper, quicker or just better for them. A purchase via visa used to be the merchant got to sell something a person would otherwise leave to get at a later time ... perhaps by then put up with second hand item or find a better deal in the mean time; so they gladly absorbed the fees visa, mastercard and amex charged - however either rules changed or it was so common place they started to pass on as a fee to the purchaser, a portion 1 .. 1.5% of the 2.5 .. 4 % that the credit card companies were charging merchants.

The govt both sides really want the economy here to eventually move to electronic so it can be tracked hard - however it was obvious the banks along with the $$$$$ credit card companies were making making a killing even at 2.5 % of all retail purchases ... so it was better to encourage merchants adopting close to free services like eftpos again which is about 0.2% max of a transaction.

Caveat - Of course some big retail stores can negotiate down the transactional percentage they pay in fee to Visa, Mastercard or Amex ... though I don't think any here got anywhere near as good a deal as Stripe. [1]

[1] https://stripe.com/au/resources/more/eftpos-fees-and-charges...

> where Visa and Mastercard debit is about 0.5%, and many credit cards are an average of 0.9% or more.