Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignormies | Hacker News Reader

Of course there are other reasons to avoid a purely cash-free society, but couldn't the Swiss government just limit the transaction rates/fees like the the EU?

> caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards;

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...

View on HN

Yes there are other reasons, you lose a lot of control, but there are other comments here already discussing that.

Yes there needs to be such mandates to limit this but it's difficult to anticipate if/when this would happen.

There was such a limit for the older Maestro cards ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) ) (afaik, but I'm not an expert in this domain). I think there the limit was CHF 0.3 per transaction. But you couldn't use them in online shopping or Apple Pay. The new debit cards can be used for that.

Maestro debit cards are common in NL and you can use them with Apple Pay.

(Online shopping is a bit different, instead of Maestro cards we use an NL-specific system called iDEAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL, basically direct bank transfers)

Then banks just charge stupidly high card-reader and merchant account fees. It still sucks for small businesses in EU.

That still sounds like a situation where the merchants could shop around and where a functioning market could be created. That is a lot harder with the transaction fees as merchants typically don't charge different prices to customers with different cards.

Sumup charges 39€ once per terminal, .9% for debit card transactions and 1.9% for credit card transactions. Nothing more.

The times when accepting card payments was expensive have been over for years. Everyone whining about "card payments cost so much" should look what the combination of pricing caps and competition have brought up, especially with the pandemic.

[1] https://help.sumup.com/de-DE/articles/4oI3qHHji2I2S9dyvRfec3...

Seems to be a bit more in Switzerland: https://www.sumup.com/de-ch/ec-kartleser-kosten/

It's still an expense to avoid for small businesses. Especially those who do relatively few transactions.

To the contrary, small businesses can save costs by going at least partially cashless. Cash costs money in itself on a variety of factors - employee theft, employee mistakes (e.g. handing too much change, accepting counterfeit cash), robberies, counting and transporting the cash to a bank, securing the cash on-premises, lost business by people not carrying wads of cash any more...

Many small businesses are +/- one-man-operations. Robberies are not a problem in many parts of a world (last local robbing I hard about was 25-ish years ago).

Customer retention is not a problem if people are used to cash.

Transporting and keeping cash is still a thing if you accept cash. Accepting cash and cards is just doubling costs and logistical issues.

The issue for one man business is accounting. You have exceptions in some places (farmer's market) you can basically do as you wish, but in small shops you have to follow rules that makes cashless less painful.

In France at least.

Modern cashier's machines do accounting pretty well. But looking at businesses I visit - old good pen&paper seem to work great as well.

Yes, but modern cashier's machine are more expensive (again, in France) than this new white terminal the new businesses around me uses.

> old good pen&paper seem to work great as well

I think that for food businesses in brick and mortar shops in France, if you take cash, you have to get a cashier's machine. Not 100% sure that's true but that's the explanation i got from a bubble tea shop who didn't take cash.

Cashier's machine is one-off purchase. You can get a really cheap 2nd hand. Meanwhile card processing embraced subscriptions all the way.

> I think that for food businesses in brick and mortar shops in France

Even tiny food businesses have quite a few transactions in a day. Wit weird sums that may make cash painful in other ways. €6.71 is fast by card than counting coins and queue length may matter at peak times. I was talking more about, for example, hairdresser where amount is square and there're very few transactions in a day.

Why does it need to be a percentage? Isn't processing a $1.00 payment the same as processing a $1000 payment?

> Isn't processing a $1.00 payment the same as processing a $1000 payment?

Technically yes, but the cost that Sumup or whatever else processor you use gets charged is based on a percentage amount set by the card networks. Sumup just adds a .5 or whatever onto the rates they get from the card networks and there's the .9/1.9% final charge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com