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Comment by angryasian | Hacker News Reader

My question to merchants would be..

Would you actually risk sales at not offering credit card payments and only offering dwolla? With companies like square they make the entire process incredibly easy.

Would you actually list two different prices on all your items or services based on paying with credit card vs dwolla, or would you just standardize and swallow the 3% or whatever it is ?

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As someone mentioned in a previous thread on dwolla (re your second point), you don't list two different prices. When the customer is checking out, you give a cash discount if you use dwolla (e.g. 3% off your purchase if you use dwolla to pay!).

Are you even allowed to do that? I thought stores don't currently do that because the credit card companies have rules saying that you can't. Or does that not apply if you use Square?

Have you ever bought a plane ticket in Europe or Australia? They offer free transactions that are not credit-card based. It's fairly common to have an extra fee in a lot of non-US online and off-line stores.

> They offer free transactions that are not credit-card based.

If you're referring to RyanAir (and the other low-cost airlines), then they only offer free transactions on obscure payment types. From what I've seen the 'free' transaction type changes whenever a more obscure and impractical payment system becomes available.

They do that so that they can legally advertise lower prices that they charge in practise.

I'm referring to most travel agents outside of the U.S. and perhaps Europe, and many restaurants, shops, boutiques. They pass the credit card fee directly to the customer in many instances, which I'm usually fine with. Larger stores will eat the fee but many smaller businesses can't do that.

I believe those rules were made illegal last year.

http://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-500.html#fdi...

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