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Comment by miltava | Hacker News Reader

It could give cashback if it cost 3% of the transaction. But it’s it’s actually much cheaper. For credit cards you have to pay for the brand, the issuer and the acquirer. And each gets a nice cut.

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Reducing merchant fees seems like a mistake if you are in competition with both cash (which has high intrinsic merchant costs) and credit cards (which has low intrinsic costs, but which are padded so they're closer to the costs of cash, with consumer cashback coming out of this padding). I'm certainly not going to _choose_ to receive less cashback, as a consumer.

Pix costs are very low and the fee for the merchant as well. They pay less for it and get the money instantly. That’s why many small merchants only accept pix and some big merchants offer discounts for payments using it.

Discounts for Pix vs cash sound cool and a fine alternative to cashback via the payment system. Though I can imagine this might be hard in some countries, where there is a strong pro-cash lobby.

I mean, the cashback is paid for out of the fees you pay for the service. In a world with low capped charges (EU etc) then you'll just pay less, which is equivalent to cashback and much fairer.

So long as the price is the same for cash and card (and Pix?), then you should pick the one that gives you the best kickbacks. I don't think capping CC fees will actually lower prices for consumers much (because merchants prefer round prices for psychological pricing). For evidence, see the fairly uniform pricing of products sold in euros between countries, despite varying vat rates between eurozone countries.

> see the fairly uniform pricing of products sold in euros between countries, despite varying vat rates between eurozone countries.

Huh, not sure I agree with that (the uniform pricing thing). I mean, one should believe that, but it doesn't appear to be true. For example, recently I saw a tablet for 208 euro (converted from GBP) on amazon.co.uk, approx 220 euro from amazon.de and 360 euro from amazon.ie, for the same item.

I was really surprised because I figured electronics would be pretty similarly priced across the EU/UK, but apparently not.

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