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Comment by veyron | Hacker News Reader

Oh I meant fees to the recipient, There's a law in the US that requires CC merchants to charge the same price as they would with cash payment (for most goods; some, like gas, have special exemptions), so when you pay X dollars by credit card the merchant receives less than X dollars.

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Could you verify that it is indeed a law? I keep on hearing different reports about this: some say that it is a law, some say that it is not a law, just a clause in the contract that the merchant and the CC network agree to.

Mastercard & Visa v (Merchants) recently settled an antitrust lawsuit regarding this practice.

>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-13/visa-mastercard-set...

>The agreement, which provides for a temporary reduction in rates for merchants and allows them to impose surcharges on customer purchases, follows a seven-year legal battle with U.S. retailers that accused the two largest payment networks of conspiring with banks to fix swipe fees, or interchange.

In the US, there was never such a law. It was a term of credit cards' merchant agreement that merchants couldn't charge extra for credit card use.

However, the recent Dodd-Frank Act limits that - merchants can give a discount for using cash and allows them to set a minimum amount for credit cards up to $10.

Oh yes, you're right on that part. Denmark have a "Dankort" a national debit card, you can't charge a fee on that, but you could on other cards, but most stores don't.

You can't charge a fee to the customer. But the retailer still has to pay a fee whenever you use any type of credit card.

Which is why I feel like a dick if I ever have to use my credit card for a sub 30kr ($5ish) purchase in a small business.

That fee is usually somewhere between 1.5% and 3% so it is quite steep. Bank transfers though in Sweden are and most of Europe are either free or cheap.

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