New VISA monthly merchant fees. Why Bitcoin is Better.

[BitPay Business Solutions]

I got this lovely letter in the mail today, as did every business that accepts VISA.  Merchants now have to pay VISA a monthly fee, ontop of the processing fees.

From what I can tell, merchants get nothing in return for this.  Merchants are still responsible for all card-not-present fraud, which we now know amounts to $50 Billion per year.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52611567/CCF04042012_00000.pdf

The largest internet merchants will pay an additional $40,000 per month to Visa, or $480,000 per year.

The largest retailers will pay an additional $340,000 per month to Visa, or $4,080,000 per year.

[kjlimo]

Can you put together a comparable for bitcoin?  I'm assuming for bitcoin it would be basically less than 1% to convert to local fiat (depending on which exchange is used to facilitate the conversion).

For bit-pay services, it's either a flat 2.69% for USD based transactions or 1% if they keep bitcoin.

I'm assuming that it's "always" cheaper no matter which situation the merchant is in.

However, making simple (but powerful) chart to show side by side with this pdf would be a great starting point for merchants.

Let me know if you would like me to try to put something like this together, but I'm kinda busy trying to work in the field getting merchants to accept bitcoin. 

Ciao

[BubbleBoy]

They are flexing their monopoly after intercharge (debit transaction) fee limits were proposed in US and elsewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee

Too sad Bitcoin is not up to the task of killing these fucking parasites.

[Etlase2]

sick

[BitPay Business Solutions]

the way the rules are written, this also applies to anyone with an account at a credit card aggregator, such as authorize.net, ccbill.com, etc.  I don't know if they consider Square or PayPal as aggregators, but those companies are acting as such.

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

WOW this is DEATH

[Aggro]

I got this lovely letter in the mail today, as did every business that accepts VISA.  Merchants now have to pay VISA a monthly fee, ontop of the processing fees.

From what I can tell, merchants get nothing in return for this.  Merchants are still responsible for all card-not-present fraud, which we now know amounts to $50 Billion per year.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/52611567/CCF04042012_00000.pdf

The largest internet merchants will pay an additional $40,000 per month to Visa, or $480,000 per year.

The largest retailers will pay an additional $340,000 per month to Visa, or $4,080,000 per year.

WOW the balls on these bankers ... I guess they own the monopoly and don't care. Yesterday I heard that bankers loose 4 billion a year in chargebacks and fraud, and pass 50 BILLIONS/Year to merchants. Lovely people!

[Boussac]

Interesting
I suppose this how we get a combined valuation of roughly 100 billion USD for Visa/Mastercard.

But, wait..the projected valuation of the bitcoin network is what ? 100 million today; That puts the above numbers on a slippery slope, doesn't it ?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Interesting
I suppose this how we get a combined valuation of roughly 100 billion USD for Visa/Mastercard.

But, wait..the projected valuation of the bitcoin network is what ? 100 million today; That puts the above numbers on a slippery slope, doesn't it ?

Um that $50B was just FRAUD.  VISA (and VISA only) annual transaction volume is $6 trillion (for FY 2011).

15,200 merchant banks
1.93 billion cards
78 billion transactions (~2500 avg tps, ~10K peak tps*)
$6 trillion total transaction volume (including cash advances)

http://corporate.visa.com/_media/visa-corporate-overview.pdf

* tps = transactions per second,

[Aggro]

Interesting
I suppose this how we get a combined valuation of roughly 100 billion USD for Visa/Mastercard.

But, wait..the projected valuation of the bitcoin network is what ? 100 million today; That puts the above numbers on a slippery slope, doesn't it ?

Um that $50B was just FRAUD.  VISA (and VISA only) annual transaction volume is $6 trillion (for FY 2011).

15,200 merchant banks
1.93 billion cards
78 billion transactions (~2500 avg tps, ~10K peak tps*)
$6 trillion total transaction volume (including cash advances)

http://corporate.visa.com/_media/visa-corporate-overview.pdf

* tps = transactions per second,

Yep. 50B worlwide fraud passed to merchants. Insane.

Another interesting pickle is that VISA and MasterCard are (technically) two different companies, but they clearly operate like a cartel and fix their fees together. So in other words, they are not merged because of antitrust laws, but they set the market together. They must pay a lot in lobbying fees to keep the feds of their backs.