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Comment by 55555 | Hacker News Reader

Google should update the Chrome TOS so that they get 30% of all sales placed through Chrome, regardless of payment processor used. They're missing out on trillions of dollars and all they have to do is update their TOS!

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A lot of businesses spend more than 30% of their products cost on Google Ads.

I know plenty of people who sell something for $20, and spend $30 on Google Ads to get that user to their site.

Pretty much every VC backed startup for the past 15 years uses that model. Startup success is in a large amount "who can use internet ads the best".

Those businesses operating at a loss are a tiny fraction of the "real economy", even though they may be giants in the future.

What does that have to do with anything? Using Google Ads is not a requirement of having your website be accessible through Google Chrome. It's not analogous to this situation at all.

But at least there are alternatives, even if Google is dominant in the space.

Competitors set those prices, not Google.

Apple has thankfully figured out that there's good money in online sales so they'll in fact get a cut if you buy stuff on Safari, although only if you use Apple Pay and even then they only get a miniscule 0.15% (or less) cut. I imagine this is because they don't have the technology to skim off all transactions yet and laws prohibiting excessive processing fees.

I'd argue 0.15% is a huge cut for the service they're offering. With Apple Pay the payment is still being processed by the card scheme, the merchant's acquirer, their bank and the user's bank. Each of these charge fees and Apple's cut likely comes out of the user's bank's cut, since they are the ones co-operating with Apple to get their cards onto Apple Pay. In the EU, this fee called interchange fee is limited to 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. Imagine if Apple managed to negotiate for 50-75% of that. That would be ludicrous in my eyes.

Does there exist a payment processor that takes zero cut?

Apple Pay is not a payment processor, it's a mechanism for delivering payment information to a payment processor.

UPI in India has 0 fees, currently doing about 52% of all digital transactions in the country.

That’s amazing. Wish we had an equivalent in the US.

I have dreamed of starting a credit card/payment processor company that does this, giving users instant discounts everywhere they use it. Retailers will bend over to move people away from paying % fees.

The problem is that it is extremely capital intensive to get it off the ground.

In the Netherlands there are payment processors with a fixed cut like 15 cents.

That's only cheaper for payments in excess of 100EUR

Mollie?

Yes for ideal. Not for CC of course because of the duopoly of visa/mastercard

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