The Amazon branded credit card is a MasterCard in the UK. So Visa raises its rates to match MC, but AMZ has a special relationship with the latter.
Costco ran into this with American Express, though in retrospect the move to Visa seems like a worse move (more non-Costco Visa cards in circulation).
I just want to stress that we both can only speculate.
Could you expand on it a worse move for Costco? I thought it was great they moved to Visa because majority of Americans does not have Amex for credit card. The only way we can use our Visa card is through debit card only. So by moving to Visa (they have largest cardholders than Amex/Discover in America), Costco gained more consumers so the consumers can use their Visa credit card without resorting to debit card. It helps me a lot because I don't and never have Amex. Amex don't have a lot of retailers coverage (they used to be popular back in the 80s/90s), same for Discover. I recalled Amex have higher transaction fees, I believe higher than Discover, and Amex explicitly disallow passing the fee to the consumers. So made sense retailers prefer Visa/MC because they have lower transaction fees. This is what I remember back in the day when Costco made this announcement.
They now accept any Mastercard. But most Canadians probably pay with Interac debit anyway.
You can pay with Visa online, but if you return to a store they hand you cash. It's really weird how anti-Visa Costco is in Canada.
I’ve been a CostCo member since at least 2006. I really liked the fact that they gave me an AmEx, but I didn’t really use it for anything other than CostCo.
About a year later, I discovered that you could use any major credit card to debit card to pay for your goods at CostCo, so long as you identified yourself with your CostCo branded card. I stopped using the CostCo branded card soon thereafter.
After they switched to Visa, I stopped going to CostCo pretty much entirely.
It wasn’t until the pandemic started that I went back to CostCo on a couple of occasions to buy some things that were not available elsewhere.
I’ve got enough Visa and MasterCards. I don’t need any more.
Not at all. These exclusive acceptance deals do usually have lower-than-otherwise rates for all cards from that issuer, though perhaps not as low as the co-branded card.
Think about it - if Costco had the same fees from a normal (not co-branded) Visa card as they did from a normal MasterCard, what incentive do they have to disallow normal MasterCards but still allow normal Visa cards?