TL;DR is the UK no longer being in the EU has removed that.
Given the size of Amazon?s business, I suspect Visa will roll over.
That said, at least one bank has switched their debit card system from the Visa system to the Master card system recently.
There is Maestro system - which seems popular in a few EU countries but I?m not aware of a card in the UK.
ISTR in discussion with a petrol station owner (Shell franchise) he said he paid about 7p/transaction for debit cards (that was a decade ago though). Not sure what they are now - but I suspect its still only pennies.
When I looked at setting up a merchant account and getting a PDQ terminal for taking payments, it percentages for CC transactions were quoted at 3.5% and the suggestion that one could negotiate downwards if you did a large enough transaction volume. (and that was on top of the £90/month they wanted for rental of the hardware!)
Indeed... and when they have forced Visa to back down, they will have extra leverage to get to work on mastercard without needing such draconian action :-)
Yup I can see why some might like it, but all I need is a way to pay online and have the benefit of joint and several liability with the card issuer, I don't really want the credit bit of the deal.
Banks regularly swapping between Visa and Mastercard has been common place for at least the last 3 decades.
An ice-cream van operator was on Jeremy Vine today. He said Visa charges are about £1000/month for him because he takes lots of small payments.
There was always a choice, in fact some cards didn't attract a surcharge. There was no piss taken, but there is now.
There was generally a choice of carrier, but even when taking into account the surcharges Ryan Air was still cheaper.
All that matters is the final cost and surcharge, if appropriate, to the customer.
If lots of people are paying low value purchases with debit cards, then that is quite possible if they sell 100s a day. The fees could easily be worth 10% or more of each low value sale...
In article <sn2r8v$1ve3$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>, Andrew snipped-for-privacy@mybtinternet.com writes
Due to Visa hiking their charge.
In article snipped-for-privacy@candehope.me.uk>, charles snipped-for-privacy@candehope.me.uk> writes
Fixed fee for debit card - was 50p per transaction when I was in business whereas credit card was %age of sale, 3% at that time. May not sound much but it's quite a chunk of your profit margin. BACS charge the banks something like 2p per transaction. Obviously the bigger the company the more clout to negotiate lower fees but from what I have read Visa tried to hike the rate from about 0.1% to
1.5% (Roughly, from memory)
Just had another update from them:
"You may have received an email yesterday which stated that starting 19 January, 2022, we will no longer accept Visa credit cards issued in the UK on Amazon.co.uk. This policy does not apply to Amazon Business accounts. Amazon Business Prime, and any Amazon Business purchases, will not be impacted by the upcoming Visa Credit card changes. We apologize for any inconvenience the announcement of these changes may have caused you."
I was wondering about that. Given it's taken quite some work by our purchasing folks to get a credit card they can buy things with (rather than classical PO/Invoice/payment-in-arrears that they much prefer - at least they've stopped using cheques!), I was not looking forward to discovering that we can't order stuff because our card happened to be a Visa.
Theo
I bought six coroneto fakes from yesterday from Farmfoods for a pound on my debit visa card how much of that goes to visa?...in the past I would never have used a card for such a small purchase but since covid you were encouraged to use cards and not cash...
I only have a Visa Debit card. However if Amazon stop then it will avalanche to other companies and may well be a way for the retail industry to put pressure on Visa. Its been interesting that on tv and radio recently, Visa has been advertising in the form of most people think visa is a credit card company, but its actually a network, so one has to ask if maybe they aware already losing customers in the shape of retailers because of their cost?
Market forces and all that. Brian
One must also realise I guess that a credit card is money lending whereas a debit card is in effect your money straight from your account.
I have thus far had no issues with the debit card on Amazon, but we would hope that if the retail trade all stand together on this, Visa will be forced to try to do what other card suppliers do. I don't have a credit card myself, though do have apaypal one, but I did not think Amazon and other big operations accepted this. However this too is tied to my visa anyway, but its a debit card. Is any transaction truly foolproof though? I have to say that though I've slagged off Lloyds about many things, they do seem pretty hot on alerting me of unusual transactions on the debit card. Brian
Not just Amazon
UK govt does not accept eu credit cards for road tax. Real p.i.t,a
Some time ago, they only accepted debit cards, without a surcharge. Perhaps it was EU legislation that changed that into taking either.
No, and that is one of the justifications for using a credit rather than a debit card. With the credit card, the card company has joint and several liability. So if the transaction were to fail in some way (say the supplier failed to deliver, or failed to rectify a defect, or ceased trading) you have a backup option of going to the card company for a refund.
Also being a credit card you have opportunity to see a transaction charge in advance of paying it, giving you chance to challenge and correct errors before paying. With a debit card the money will already have been taken from your account and you are in the weaker situation of attempting to get a refund.
Last time I paid a tax bill they didn't accept any Credit Card, except business ones where they could still add a surcharge.
I have no idea why you put "EU" into that sentence.
Should have waited until you wanted to buy something. For ages, they seem to have been offering £20 off at checkout when you sign up
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