Amazon To Stop Accepting Visa Credit Cards Issued in the UK, Citing High Fees (cnbc.com) 99
Amazon plans to stop accepting payments made via Visa credit cards issued in the U.K. starting next year. From a report: The e-commerce giant has told some customers that, from Jan. 19 onward, the company will no longer accept Visa credit cards issued in Britain "due to the high fees Visa charges for processing credit card transactions." Visa earlier this year hiked the interchange fees it charges merchants for processing digital transactions between the U.K. and the European Union. After Brexit, an EU cap on interchange fees no longer applies in the U.K., allowing card networks to raise their charges. Mastercard has also increased its U.K.-EU interchange fees. Amazon customers were told they will still be able to use debit cards -- including those issued by Visa -- and non-Visa credit cards like Mastercard and American Express. Users are being encouraged to update their default payment method ahead of the changes.
monopoly challenge! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's good to have monopolies so that they can fight the other monopolies for us.
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Well no one needs to use VISA, nor do they need to use Amazon.
Master Card and Amex didn't seem to raise their fees in UK, so people can switch Credit Cards (which isn't that big of a deal) if they feel their Visa isn't as accectped compared to the others. Or if they Like their VISA card more than Amazon, then they will shop at different places (Probably UK based companies) in which the UK Government probably would be happy with.
I do expect people rely more on Amazon than they do with Visa, and just get a n
Re:monopoly challenge! (Score:5, Informative)
Mastercard has also increased its U.K.-EU interchange fees.
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That is because of Brexit, UK is no longer covered by the EU limit on how much companies can be charged for transactions, thus absent corresponding regulations in UK, the companies are free to set their own charges( of course subject to seller revolt like in this case with Amazon)
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In the end it is your own money coming back, so it seems like the one paying is yourself,
hence, the seller needs to raise the prices...
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I recently bought some motorcycle boots straight from Italy and almost used paypal - whoah, 4% foreign transaction fee. So I started looking at my cards, one was 3%, one was 0% - bingo.
Maybe this is obvious to Europeans, or about to become a bigger issue for Britons, but it's something many Americans rarely have to think about.
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Yup, it somewhat compensates for the hidden expenses of using credit card's
No, it's just a really weird way of getting discounts while earning interest to someone else.
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In the end it is your own money coming back, so it seems like the one paying is yourself,
hence, the seller needs to raise the prices...
Yes, the seller needs to raise prices to cover the rebates. But since some get the rebates and some don't, the non-rebaters are subsidizing the rebaters.
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The thing is: Credit card fees to companies in EU are capped at 0.3%. Thus there is not much "cash back" to give. In US the fees to companies are much higher, thus there is more to "give back"
But, I live in Europe and have 2%/1% cash back bonus (limited to 200 eur/yr) on my most used card and 0.5% with no limit from the second one.
That bonus is in itself strange as they also have no yearly/monthly fee and no other cards that I could get seem to have such bonuses. I guess they hope that enough people will n
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That bonus is in itself strange as they also have no yearly/monthly fee and no other cards that I could get seem to have such bonuses. I guess they hope that enough people will not pay their bills and they get to charge that 18% yearly interest.
They are encouraging you to use the card so they can get fees from the merchant.
Who then has to put the price up to compensate.
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Well, they are limited to the 0.3% from the merchant by EU rules for EU based merchants.
That is what I mean it is strange to get more than that back.
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One reason Amex haven't raised their fees is that they are already eye-wateringly high compared to Visa and Mastercard.
Well, they were...
Such are the level playing fields in the sunlit uplands of Brexit as promised by Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson. Something something Tacitus, something something.
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That article (behind two cookie walls, thanks for that) is about US charges. I couldn't be bothered to see if it meant transaction only or all charges to retailers, but most small businesses don't take Amex in Europe (and UK) due to how much is charged.
As for 1%, for a single transaction that doesn't seem like a lot. Except that means it's 1% of your gross income paid via them. Not so small an amount per year, is it? For a reasonably successful small to medium retailer, that's probably more than the salary
yawn, slow news day? (Score:5, Funny)
How is this news for nerds? True nerds are paying in coin or whatever the latest blockchain nonsense is this week.
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Amazon is a "Tech Company"?
However way back in the early days, of the mid-1990's I use to go, Amazon.com is NOT A TECH COMPANY IT IS A BOOK STORE. Stop treating it like a tech company, and treat it like a mail to order company.
But I am not influential or popular enough for people to listen to me. If they did we wouldn't have businesses still using IE because of ActiveX controls.
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That ActiveX stuff is just waiting to gain popularity, it's on the way back; just wait!
There are certain technologies and ways of doing business that must die, unfortunately they're written into legislation provided by lobbyists that makes them harder to kill.
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Amazon is a "Tech Company"?
However way back in the early days, of the mid-1990's I use to go, Amazon.com is NOT A TECH COMPANY IT IS A BOOK STORE. Stop treating it like a tech company, and treat it like a mail to order company.
Jeff Bezos: *Laughs Evil-ly in Amazon Web Services* Mr.BurnsEvilLaugh.gif
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Most of their business is AWS.
People don't listen to you because you don't know what you're talking about.
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Mail order companies don't host a significant fraction of the internet on their in-house servers.
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wait, was there a memo? I didn't get the memo dammit!
Re: yawn, slow news day? (Score:2)
Haha. Grandpa here still uses memos. Do you also write P.S.?
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Notice: Nerds continue to read and write, even after the invention of the jeejah.
P.S.: Get Off My Lawn!!
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I think it was titled, "Is Math Really Hard?" and explained that nerds find math easy. They also read. Actively, regularly, unprompted. And so they understand how money works, where it comes from, what it is used for. Crypto is for money laundering. Real money is for earning, spending, saving, and investing legally.
Re: yawn, slow news day? (Score:2)
I was going to argue how your all wrong. How a new update to bitcoin means no more shady business. But it turns out your right, so I will just say something like"Yadav Yadav flag theory" while I sigh and feel internet defeated.
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Their monopoly exists because of the lobbying and "war on cash" that's driving legislators to tax and track everything. Debit card fees are on the rise too, which wasn't supposed to happen either but monopolies monopolize.
It costs Visa maybe $.001 / transaction for a Debit card transaction. That's a long way from 2% I'm seeing them charge.
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I pay using NFTs of my code snippets.
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True hipster-techie-brohemes are paying in coin or whatever the latest blockchain nonsense is this week.
FTFY
Nerds are still nerds. The software industry has just morphed into the "tech" industry which is very much like the fashion industry. It is fueled by narcissism and pretentiousness. Therefore, its "thought leaders" are pretentious narcissists rather than the nerds of old.
Elsewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon recently started adding a surcharge for payments made using Visa credit cards in Singapore. In areas where there are not regulations limiting what they can charge, Visa charges more for credit card payment processing and Amazon passes that charge on to their customers. It's probably the same everywhere.
This is what happens when regulations are lighter.
A large retailer like Amazon might actually have enough weight to force Visa to change. If Visa get away with it, it's likely that the other card issuers will also increase their fees to match.
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Sure, or they could force the UK to change, Visa is probably stronger than the UK at this point
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Amazon isn't refusing to do business with the UK; they're refusing to do business with Visa in the UK. Brits can still buy from Amazon with a MasterCard etc., which puts pressure on Visa to back down.
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This is quite funny.
However, until VISA owns their own nuclear submarines and arsenal, they're not even close.
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It would not be unheard of. Even Pepsi had a navy once.
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India maybe developing but (Score:5, Informative)
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Of course you have all those choices. The Indian government much prefers electronic payments, they are so much easier to track and tax.
Mind you, I think paying your taxes is necessary, almost virtuous, and evading taxes is cheating your friends who do not. But, if Indians paid their taxes as reliably as the government is trying to make them, perhaps they would recognize the amount of theft that represents and resist, or perhaps those additional collections could actually fund real and permanent change, or t
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Re: India maybe developing but (Score:2)
China is pretty similar in transaction speed. The western world's banking and payment seems antiquated to say the least and I think it's largely to keep power in the hands of the banking regime. When payments become too easy, it can wither their positions as the payment systems gain power and then services to become effective banks. In some regards this has lead to the relative success of crypto-currency.
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It's not perfect but it makes many types of crime more difficult.
On the other hand, it makes many types of crimes easier. Consider checks. Once they "clear", you have the money in your account and you can be confident that you've been paid, right? Except that checks effectively never actually clear. The transaction can be rolled back weeks, months or years later because there was never anything to cover the check. A lot of scams work this way, often by buying big ticket items and reselling them before the original owner finds out that money is being pulled back out of th
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Checks?
Last time I have seen checks in here was 1986 when I worked a summer job in a gas station and they were on the way out then, but still occasionally used.
I never even thought about getting a checkbook here as they were not in use by the time I was in the workforce properly and younger people (like people in their thirties) today likely would have to look up what the word means as they have never heard or seen such.
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Curious, how do you get paid? Do you get handed cash? Chickens or other livestock as barter? Venmo? Do you charge your employer's credit card for your pay? Or do you get an electronic transfer that involves a routing number and an account number? If it's that last one, I assume that's to a checking account? That means that you are, in fact, using checks, even if you're not filling them out by hand on paper. Anyway, that particular check scam was just one example. The "slowness" in the banking system, checki
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>Curious, how do you get paid? Do you get handed cash? Chickens or other livestock as barter? Venmo? Do you charge your employer's credit card for your pay? Or do you get an electronic transfer that involves a routing number and an account number? If it's that last one, I assume that's to a checking account?
Payment to a bank account, Europe uses IBAN numbers, not some "routing" numbers and account number. Though the IBAN number contains the country, bank and account number embedded.
>That means that y
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Well, the US is definitely archaic in many things. You did not specify originally that you were specifically talking about Europe as opposed to the US. In any case, the original point was not specifically about paper checks, it's really about back-end transfers between banks and how those "instant" transfers are not actually anywhere near instant. The books can stay unbalanced between banks for a long time, possibly years. If it finally turns out that the transfer was actually unfunded, the banks don't say,
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I get paid by a direct transfer of money from my company's bank account into my bank account. It seems to be more or less instantaneous now and is, in fact, almost entirely unlike a cheque.
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It sounds like you don't actually know how you get paid. Maybe you set it up a long time ago and forgot. One thing to consider is what they actually call your bank account. Do they, per chance, call it a "checking account"? It really, really sounds like it's an electronic check being used to pay you. The original scenario I described wasn't really about physical paper checks anyway. It was about how banks handle transfers from one back to another on the back end when something happens like a check being cas
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As you say, there's no perfect solution. Protecting the buyer may make the seller a victim and vice versa. Speeding things up sacrifices security. Slowing things down sacrifices convenience. Generally anything that increases convenience sacrifices security. Absolutely eliminating fraud is probably impossible (without outside the box "solutions" like eliminating the human race so that there's no more crime at all, or putting chips in everyone's heads, or everyone becoming an ascetic monk). You just have to t
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But I thought the UK had very fast electronic funds transfers and that was driving high levels of scams there. I saw a UK reality TV show where court debt collectors turned up demanding thousands of pounds and, in many cases, the debtors paid electronically with the funds confirmed received within minutes by the court’s admin staff.
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The court debt collectors were not scammers, just an illustration that electronic funds transfer in the UK takes only minutes for anyone with a bank account. Here's a recent story [reuters.com] that mentions how the UK's "super-fast payments infrastructure" contributes to fraud there.
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So what's the analog of the FDIC in India? We have lots of options in the US too, but they aren't FDIC insured or don't connect to FDIC insured accounts so they aren't considered a "bank account" or "bank transfer". Also credit cards are an entirely different animal because their primary benefit to the user is that fraudulent transactions can be reversed, which I believe is not even a concept in all the systems you mention. It appears you are comparing un-secured transaction mechanisms with secure and fr
Re: India maybe developing but (Score:2)
RuPay competitor (Score:3)
"we have local network called RuPay, an open platform network"
Well I know of an even more open platform called "RuPaul".
Brinksmanship (Score:3)
first shipping (Score:2)
Seems like Amazon first tried this with shipping. Now Amazon has its own 'contracted' delivery service. Won't be long before you need an Amazon card to shop at Amazon - that will require automatic payments and will not have any customer service.
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Seems like Amazon first tried this with shipping. Now Amazon has its own 'contracted' delivery service. Won't be long before you need an Amazon card to shop at Amazon - that will require automatic payments and will not have any customer service.
...and further it must be attached to an existing bank account, and they reserve the rights to withdraw funds from the account at any time?
Not that uncommon (Score:2)
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I've never seen any place accepting only amex. And a lot of places don't accept it. Pretty useless to have for travel.
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Odd, in the US, Costco only uses Visa.
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Odd, in the US, Costco only uses Visa.
Used to be Amex. That change occurred about 4-5 years ago.
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Unfortunately, this is currently illegal in the UK. Retailers aren't allowed to charge different prices for different payment methods, at least not when they get paid in full. Charging more when the customer pays in instalments is still allowed. Back when they were allowed to charge different prices for different payment methods, smaller retailers would tack on as much as 3
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Interesting, until a decade or so ago, Australia had a similar law where retailers could not pass on the credit card fee. That seemed like a law that could only have arisen by politicians being in the pockets of the credit card companies. It was rescinded, and now some small amount of shops pass it on (often low-margin businesses).
Were I king, I'd go further and decree all businesses had to add the payment fee on checkout, then laugh as all the twenty-somethings abandoned their trendy 'not really a credit c
Another Brexit-Dividend (Score:2, Troll)
Sunny uplands!
The gods are feuding (Score:2)
Kinda like when the big 3 networks get into pissing contests with cable or satellite providers over something or other.
The TV generally still works regardless.
Perhaps it's rose colored nostalgia glasses talking but back in the day these arguments tended not to spill out of the smoke filled back rooms where they belong.
20th century banking meets 21st century greed (Score:2)
Are people really still using banks that charge for every fucking thing you do?
There's a new generation of modern banks that specialize in shifting money around. Which is kind of the whole point of money in the first place.
And they do it at very low cost. And the recipient gets every penny of what I pay.
ROTFLMAO: Brexit effect (Score:3)
As the article says, the EU cap no longer applies.
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Which is honestly odd. EU laws work by member countries implementing them. So Boris the Clown must have deliberately removed it.
Re:ROTFLMAO: Brexit effect (Score:4, Informative)
EU laws work by member countries implementing them.
Directives do.
Regulations do not. These are immediately applicable in every member state without prior transcription into national law. They preferably cover technicalities and details pertaining to the single market - norms, standards, and not least things like roaming charges and transaction fee caps. EU regulations ceased to apply in the UK with the UK's formal exit from the EU. Which is why we're seeing mobile roaming charges and the fees referred to in TFA coming back now.
Brexit benefits (Score:4, Insightful)
I've lost count of all these Brexit benefits.
Unrelated to Brexit, according to Amazon/Visa/BBC (Score:2)
From the BBC's coverage:
Amazon and Visa said any changes in fees had nothing to do with Brexit.
Both Visa and its rival Mastercard have raised the so-called interchange fee on cross-border transactions between businesses in the UK and the European Union following Brexit.
The dispute between Amazon and Visa is to do with the fees the credit card company charges Amazon for its services in the UK.
https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
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Amazon and Visa are both lying about Brexit.
Visa Credit Cards? (Score:2)
People still use them online?
Okay I jest somewhat, I'm simply surprised that there is no viable alternative other than Amazon / Paypal.
When I check out I get given a whole list of options including cash based barcodes, direct debit, links to bank based systems, Apple, Google, and yes credit cards as well. But these days the only reason I have a credit card is because car hire companies insist.
At least they make a good search engine (Score:1)
Ever since Amazon had that tantrum over the GST, their site is nothing more than a fancy search engine for me to look up whatever book I need details on that can be used to order through a local dealer at a fraction of the cost.
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I've used amazon since 2001. In 2018 they silently deleted my account. No warning, nothing. One day my account just didn't exist anymore. The only explanation I can think of is that I had purchased some items and had them shipped to Australia. When Amazon opened an official presence in Australia, they wanted people to buy from amazon.com.au instead of buying the exact same items more cheaply from the USA. I guess they expected me to sign up for an .au account to replace the one they nuked?
Haven't touched th
Seems that Amazon wants to... (Score:2)
How long before they start trying to pull this in other countries?
Did they actually say to use a debit card?! (Score:2)
Maybe those have better legal protections in the UK than I'm used to? In the US, anyone with basic common sense does not risk a debit card online.
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I'm in the UK. My debit card details were used fraudulently a couple of years ago. The first I knew about it was when the bank rang me and asked me about certain suspicious transactions. I was refunded for all of the fraudulent transactions. That included, by the way, a payment to a judicial court for a fine imposed by that court. I often wonder what happened to the person who tried to defraud the British Courts with a stolen credit card.