This is one of the big casualties of the American credit card conglomerates' failure to focus on reducing fraud. They get paid regardless of whether a transaction is fraudulent or not, so they have no incentive to improve. The result is that this burden gets dropped on merchants, requiring both man-hours and cost, and it disproportionately affects smaller companies. It basically amounts to a tax by the merchant processors on small businesses, for no benefit to anyone but themselves.

I've seen the discussions crop up on Hacker News before* of people starting commercial websites, getting hit with massive amounts of fraud, and either having to just shutdown completely or shell out more of their margin for a third party fraud prevention service. It's disgusting.

From the consumer's perspective it is nice that credit cards are easy to use, and that we are protected from bad merchants, thieves, etc. But we're putting a strangle on small business with this system. There are better ways that would both reduce fraud overall, thus saving consumers money, and not disproportionately penalize small businesses. It wouldn't make credit cards any harder to use.

On a tangent, Humble Bundle stopped accepting Bitcoin a year or two ago. Considering that Bitcoin can have a 0% fraud rate it makes it a somewhat odd move, especially since Humble Bundle is a really great target for fraud (the goods are easy to move). And no, I don't view Bitcoin as an ideal solution (as it exists today); it's on the opposite side of this problem, foisting fraud prevention onto the consumer. But from Humble Bundle's perspective (and any business, small or big) it is the perfect solution to preventing fraud.

* The ones I'm recalling are even more sad. They were getting hit by fraudsters who were just using their site to test the cards, before moving on to the actual fraud target(s). The end result is the same, though.