Yup, the UK right now is blaming everyone but themselves (or at least the papers are). There was fury about Belgian authorities taking away sandwiches etc from UK lorry drivers. I also read that someone in the UK got really annoyed that they had to queue up in the 'Outside EU' line....
Unfortunately I think we'll have to feel the pain for a while before in convinces anyone, but that pain is probably going to all get blamed on Coronavirus for the foreseeable future so it may take some time.
True but I meant the newspapers more than people. Personally Covid will ride the storm for most of these consequences up until it can longer do so but I imagine there would be some new deals and processes in place by then. Well I hope at least...
There was fury about Belgian authorities taking away sandwiches etc from UK lorry drivers
That happened once and people were right to be furious because the Dutch customs guy was a dick. No rule requires him to confiscate the lunch of lorry drivers and then say "Welcome to Brexit". It's that kind of nasty backstabbing pettiness that makes EU ideology so deeply unattractive that the UK voted to leave.
Nonetheless it's hilarious that so far despite the EU's best efforts to create as many problems as possible via "work to rule" type approaches, the media focuses on that. The EU-loving media class spent years telling people that if the UK dared to leave this horrible organisation there'd be immediate shortages of medicine. Now they have to hype up stories about dickish border guards whilst desperately trying to hide the fact that literally weeks after Brexit happened there are medicine shortages in the EU. People who argued against Brexit have been wrong about so many things so far I shouldn't be surprised but that one still takes the biscuit.
> No rule requires him to confiscate the lunch of lorry drivers and then say "Welcome to Brexit"
Actually, a rule does require him to confiscate any meat product that someone might try to bring into the EU [1] (incidentally I believe that the USA have the same rule), which is what happened: It was a ham sandwich.
If you watch the video the driver was very surprised. Personally I took the customs guy's reply "welcome to Brexit" as a humorous but factual and to the point explanation.
The goal of those rules is to stop people importing meat and selling it, not workers eating their lunch.
Look, this is very simple: if the EU's rules require confiscating the lunch of people who are trying to do business, then the rules are wrong and should be fixed. Blaming Brexit or saying "the USA does it too" isn't a great answer when it'd be so easy to fix this.
I think the main thing I've been learning about import/export rules in/out of the EU in the past few weeks is how much life must have been sucking for years for people trying to trade with us who aren't physically in Europe. A huge number of the rules that are tripping people up are stuff that's just taken to an absurd bureaucratic extreme, like the guys who couldn't sell their fish because the Latin name on a form had a spelling error, or the others who needed to translate their product description into every single European language before they could put their goods on a lorry.
The EU could easily fix all these things and make the lives of not only Brits but everyone else easier too, but the so-called single market is basically the only argument they have for why a country should join the EU. The EU has created a perverse incentive for itself to make selling things to it as convoluted and painful as possible. That is ultimately bad for everyone, but especially for people who live and work in member states.
Movement of infected meat? Where did you get that from? I have been reading about COVID every day for the last year and never saw anyone make that claim before, so this looks like motivated reasoning. Are you thinking of wet markets? The whole "people eating bats/civets" theory fell out of favour ages ago, and of course none of those animals crossed borders anyway.
As for spread of people, truckers have been allowed to cross borders even when they've been closed the whole time, as otherwise supply chains would collapse. So it's irrelevant to this case. The guy wasn't doing a COVID check.
I also think you really don't understand the job of a border controller.
I think I do! Political trolling and lunch confiscation are definitely not components of it.
That's like saying a personal baggie of cocaine is for lunch therefore you should not confiscate it. If it's on the list of no-entry then it's on there for a reason.
You should probably ask your countrymen to be less batshit at least for a moment. It's not as much as that there's no news anywhere else, it's just that Americans are sucking up all of the oxygen.
This is not something I or any other sane American can fix. It will take generations to root out this nonsense. Until parents/communities stop teaching their children bigotry and racism and scarcity mindset are good - we will lose this battle. It starts with the kids.
The only feeling that’s triggered in me is being sorry for normal UK folks.
And, I think we will really know after a couple of years if this was a “mistake”. Being in the EU feels often like a “mistake”, too. I am not thinking my country should leave, but I’d love to see a major reform making the EU much lighter, less bureaucratic and focused on core topics instead of being this gigantic monster that’s deciding which popups I need to see.
Look up the actual numbers, chances are that you’ll find the actual EU bureaucracy is nimbler and more cost-effective than your national one, per-head. The EU budget is tiny.
The choice of matters discussed at EU level is sadly due to the agenda of national states, for the major part; in a lot of cases it’s actually what they don’t feel brave enough to touch but still think “something should be done about”, so the EU provides plausible deniability. If you feel this is not to your likes, complain to your MEPs and your national MPs.
Personally I think some issues won’t be solved until we have more European authority rather than less; a bit like the US ended up moving most powers to the federal government during its first 150 years.
> Look up the actual numbers, chances are that you’ll find the actual EU bureaucracy is nimbler and more cost-effective than your national one, per-head. The EU budget is tiny.
This might very well be true. However, it is not only about costs, is it? I really doubt that the cost-benefit ratio is on the same level as my national one.
When you bring "benefit" into the equation, inevitably we enter the political sphere, and then everything is debatable and somewhat linked to one's priorities. Personally, just the effort in industrial and commercial standardization across the continent is worth that money, let alone the increased cooperation and power effects.
Just support your country negotiating opt outs of things you don't like. That's one thing I thought really worked about the EU, when we were in we had opt outs on all sorts of things. Schengen, the Euro, various employment legislation, it was very flexible. The only things we were 'forced' into were a few marginal issues like the details of the contents of labels on tin cans and such. I thought two speed Europe, really multi-speed Europe worked pretty well. It's been rather sad watching so many Brexiteers complaining about EU regulations and agreements we weren't even part of.
It would be a bureaucratic mess, that multi-speed Europe. The whole point is that the rules are the same everywhere so you don't need red tape between countries.
The EU really needs to get better at educating everyone what it actually does and why it exists. How much money they spend every year and how much the EU actually costs every citzen in Europe on average.
It will probably help, but let's not forget that every politicians in the UK was blaming the EU for any unpopular law they passed, rightly or wrongly. The british press was no better.
The SNP has already announced that they will hold another independence referendum should they win a majority in the Scottish Parliament in Mays elections - which seems highly likely:
The current narrative in the uk media is that the EU have failed to plan the Covid Vaccines effectively as they insisted doing it as a single block, and that the UK has done much better as we were no longer tied to them and could move much quicker.
If there is any truth to that it's a big vindication of Brexit and I say that as a remain voter.
GP is a reflection of the current political state of affairs: to feel schadenfreude, you need that us-vs-them mentality, and GP mentions feeling schadenfreude like it’s the most natural thing ever.
Call me surprised on that one. The banks were pissed to say the least about the interchange fee cap since it was introduced in 2015 - estimates run on a yearly loss (aka more money in the hands of the consumers) of 1-2 billion € a year (per https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/europeans...). I would not be surprised if the other card networks follow MasterCard here, even if it's just British consumers affected it's still a lot of money that they're leaving on the table.
The "downside" (from an US point of view) on this cap is that European credit cards don't have ridiculous card bonus programs that are in reality subsidized by all people not paying by credit cards.
I thought that the card bonus programs on US credit cards were subsidized not by the transaction fees, but by the monthly interest payments. So actually payed by the non-responsible credit card users.
I wonder how Amex is able to make money in Europe? They still have a quite generous rewards program (not as generous as the US, but not bad) and I thought they always charged high tx fees (which is also why not all merchants chose to accept it). But the argument being that they also have the high earners = high spenders in their network, and merchants can attract more of those customers by accepting Amex. If the cap was at 0.3%, how can they be any different than MasterCard/Visa cards, which usually don't have reward programs here?
> I thought they always charged high tx fees (which is also why not all merchants chose to accept it).
I used to work in a PC retail/repair shop and the reason we didn't take amex wasn't because of the fees, it was because they held the balances for longer than Visa/MC, and occasionally we had bills to pay in that time period too!
The cap only applies to transactions that have three or more entities involved.
For Mastercard/Visa you will have at lease three entities involved:
1. The retailer
2. The card network Mastercard/Visa
3. The card issuer (the customers bank)
Amex dodge this by being both the card network and the issuer. So there are only two parties involved in their transactions.
1. The retailer
2. Amex
So they charge a much higher interchange than Mastercard/Visa can. Which is also the reason why there will never be an Amex competitor in Europe. No merchant would ever sign up to anew card network that charged more and had no customers. Equally no customer would signup for card they couldn’t use anywhere.
Stripe’s pricing is quite a bit higher than many of their competitors. They roll up what is quite a complex pricing structure (there are pages and pages of network fees to consider) into a single number.
For most people not having to deal with the details makes Stripe worth it. But once to get to a certain scale it becomes much cheaper to use a competitor, and just have people working full time on understanding and managing the fees involved.
Yeah, quite interesting that. Adyen charges ~1% for Visa and MC in Europe, but 3.95% for Amex. Stripe just charges 1.9% for all European cards, so they are actually significantly cheaper than Adyen to accept Amex.
> The "downside" (from an US point of view) on this cap is that European credit cards don't have ridiculous card bonus programs
I've never even had a credit card. I just have a debit card that allows me to spend the money in my account (plus a limited overdraft of about €1000). I've never seen the point of anything else and I'd be suspicious as hell if a bank offered me a credit card with a reward program.
Even European credit cards usually have much better buyer protections than debit cards. Like if your flight gets cancelled or if the shop you bought from goes under between your order and delivery.
I was surprised moving to Germany, the default Visa card you get is a 30 day rolling credit card, aka charge card. Visa Debit and Mastercard's equivalent don't seem to be popular. And even less popular is a full-on credit card. A much healthier attitude there I believe.
In the UK (and I think most other EU states), if you purchase on credit card you get a lot of additional protection if the product/service is not as described, the company goes out of business, etc for purchases over £100.
It's actually pretty reckless using debit cards for larger purchases for this reason, especially given the current economic climate. You should (IMO) always pay with a credit card then pay the full balance off via direct debit every month.
Sigh, do we really have to play this game? I'll take the other side.
I wonder what all the EU citizens think who are not getting vaccinated because the EU thought it would play hard ball with the drug companies, who basically went elsewhere as they don't care about EU bureaucratic games?
That may be the intention, and it may yet be achieved, but the most recent figures I’ve seen say that the UK is vaccinating at about five time the rate (vaccine doses per 100) as the EU average.
For all the many times the UK dropped the ball over this pandemic (and separately over Brexit), the British health systems — both NHS and private — are actually good at vaccinating people. For example, last time I visited friends in the country, I got a seasonal flu vaccine from a supermarket without an appointment.
Yeah. I'm currently in Sweden, and it's like living in a third-world country all over again. They are now struggling to supply proper needles for the vaccine smh
The UK could have chosen to take part in the EU schemes any time last year had it wanted to.
Equally, any EU member state could have chosen to go their own way. The EU didn't force them to collectively bargain to (successfully) get better value deals.
Maybe the EU will do a worse job distributing, but it's too early to say.
The vaccination programs are national. The Netherlands has received its vaccines from the EU, but they are being kept in storage because the national vaccination program is being slow.
Indeed. But approval of the vaccines is centralised, and is demonstrably slower than US, UK, and others. And wasn't purchasing strategy (with heavy reliance on AZ) also centralised? [1]
You think it's an anomaly that EU countries are below UK and the US (despite the publicised failure of the Trump regime to plan for this)?
Just in the news today that they may start withholding the Pfizer vaccine for EU countries, and since they're made in Belgium there's not a lot we can do about that.
"From October, Mastercard said it would increase these fees to 1.5% on every transaction, up from 0.3%. The EU introduced a cap on such fees in 2015 after concerns they pushed prices up for consumers and unfairly burdened companies."
"Mastercard is implementing the rises simply as it's no longer bound by the restrictions imposed by the UK being in the EU."
Thus proving the caps were indeed necessary. If MC was making money with a 0.3% fee the other 1.2% are pure sweet profit margin.
It is unlikely it proves that. Mastercard doesn't have a monopoly on transactions (or if it does, that is the problem). If the profits are extreme other payment processors will step in.
It is more likely there are significant regulatory or other burdens taking UK orders for EU goods.
Also, I think it's important to remember but most of us don't go and select Mastercard or Visa, most of us don't care. We just use what the banks use. I suspect changing from Mastercard to Visa would be extremely expensive and it's a lot easier and more profitable to just pass along that to the customer.
The customer chooses the card, the retailer pays the fee. Other companies can't undercut Mastercard's fees because the consumer(the person making the decision of payment type here) doesn't know or care what the fee is.
> Other companies can't undercut Mastercard's fees because the consumer(the person making the decision of payment type here) doesn't know or care what the fee is.
You got the consumer part wrong. The consumer is the merchant, which can decide if they allow Mastercard cards or not. Same as many merchants don't accept Amex. It's because they don't like to pay the Amex fee. Same as many merchants don't accept Apple Pay or Android Pay or why some merchants only allow card payments for purchases of a minimum amount.
Merchants are the consumers and they decide what cards they will accept. Based on what cards they will accept consumers will be picky about which cards they want to have. For those exact reasons I have a VISA credit card as well as an AMEX because I sometimes can't use my AMEX, otherwise I wouldn't even have a VISA CC.
Very few merchants have the market power to say no to either Mastercard or Visa. It would prevent to many customers from being able to give them money. Which would then make it pretty tricky for the merchant to make money.
Also Apple Pay and Android Pay don’t cost merchants more to implement or use (assuming they have the HW, which any card reader from the past 10 years will have). The card network rules also forbid merchants from not accepting them, but of course rules don’t mean much without enforcement.
Finally there is really only one company that can undercut Mastercard, and that’s Visa. It’s only a question of time before Visa bump their fees, there’s no way they’re gonna leave money on the table for long.
In most of the US, credit card surcharges (charging customers a higher price when using credit cards than when using cash or debit/bank cards) are legal.
Is it also legal to charge customers a fee based on what type of card they use? A large number of customers have multiple cards anyway, so that would be a meaningful incentive.
Are we living in the same world? Visa+MC are a duopoly borderlining being a de facto cartel organization and handle the vast majority of all retail transactions in the world.
There is only one other payment processor (at least for cards) and that’s Visa.
The margins are extreme, but so are the barriers to entry. To build a new card network you somehow need to convince a bunch of banks and merchants to support your card network. Good luck with that.
The EU even forced Mastercard to allow others to start a card network running over their infrastructure, after they bought EuroPay. But it’s so hard to get people to actually use a new card network, that no ones actually bothered to try.
This Brexit 'deal' just gets worse and worse by the day.
Weren't they supposed to have turned all existing EU law into UK law anyway as a starting point? Maybe phone operators will be next on this train.
I also don't understand how this 'free trade' deal seems to still be costing businesses so much money in customs fees? Isn't the point of a free trade deal that you don't pay customs?
At least Boris Johnson got the Coronavirus pandemic right, oh wait...
The mobile operator 3 have upped their prices on pay as you go. They had a "123" PAYG plan that was 1p/MB 2p/Text and 3p/Min. They now are changing it on Feb 16th to 5p/MB 10p/Text 10p/min. They claim "Some of our international roaming rates are also increasing. This is to keep them in line with domestic standard rates and not a result of brexit"
No, we explicitly rejected a customs union. Customs union would result in no customs (though probably not as you'd have to also be part of the single market to eliminate all checks).
The free trade agreement is different, and a step down from that. Given the amount of trade I think the customs fees will come down significantly over time once things are bedded in a bit more.
it's explicitly not free trade, the entire purpose of leaving the EU was to erect barriers to trade and remove the regulation (good and...bad). "free trade" is just a phrase the Tories like to say because "we're the party of protectionism and crony capitalism" sounds bad even if it is honest...if they cared about trade between the UK and the EU then they wouldn't have left the single market or the customs union, but they prioritised ending free movement above absolutely everything else including the UK economy and UK global competitiveness. and after all this, they *still* didn't manage to make the far right of the Tory party banging on about europe.
they were supposed to transcribe all the EU regulations and law into UK law, but they also granted themselves power to change lots of it via regulation (ie without going to parliament)...it's unclear what specifically happened here.
Sure, but that won't stop MC from raising the prices now that the UK no longer has the bargaining power of the EU behind it. What are they going to do, forbid MC from operating in the UK alone? But the threat of all of the EU banning a particular card issuer has some serious teeth in it.
The EU has so much bargaining power that in fact they have the greatest bargaining power of all. Nobody has so much bargaining power like the EU. Before the EU people didn't even know what bargaining power means.
The EU has so much bargaining power that countries like the UAE or Israel could never get hold of more vaccines than the EU -.-
Doesn't change the fact that countries like Israel were able to secure more vaccines relatively to their population (and their GDP) than the EU has so far. Seems like Israel negotiated better than the EU despite the EU constantly self proclaiming to be the best negotiator with the best bargaining power in the world. So far Israel has negotiated and the EU resorts to threatening vaccine nationalism. From the downvotes I can only imply that truth does hurt sometimes.
If I have 5 guests, I can go to a supermarket and buy 5 beers.
If I have 5000 guests, I have to find a beer maker who can make and deliver 5000 beers by a given date. The difference in the challenge is obvious, to any rational observer.
But sure, from far enough, both things can be described as "buying beers for guests".
And more importantly: you can afford to pay twice as much because in absolute terms that's not a huge amount for a relatively rich country as Israel. The EU on a per-capita basis isn't nearly as rich and isn't going to give the medical companies all of their data.
Actually, Israel could not really negotiate because they are quite small and do not produce the vaccine locally, so had no leverage at all.
What happened is what always happens when you really want something but are not in a position to negotiate: You end up paying a lot of money. Israel is said to be paying $47 for the Pfizer vaccine while the US are paying $19.50, and the EU... $14.76. [1]
This is the charge Marstercard levies on merchants in the EU, so it has nothing to do with UK legislation, and EU legislation doesn't impose the limit on orders from outside the EU.
Unless UK customers get different pricing to EU ones it wont make a difference. The one receiving the funds (in the EU) is the one that is left worse off. The winner is the UK based bank processing transactions..
Well normally when I do online shopping price is explicitly the sum of base_product_price, shipping_choice, payment_method. So in my experience, a more expensive payment method translates to more expenses to me, the buyer.
If you are a European store, and say you receive in EUR and charge in another currency it is highly disadvantageous to you. The payment processor usually charges a fee to convert the currency. Stripe for example charges 2% to convert (which is worse than the 1.5% interchange fee increase, and is is additive to it). You are significantly worse off in this situation.
Also if you are a British consumer simply pay in Euros, and let your card do the conversion for you - you typically get the interbank rate with most modern banks.
Assuming that they have GBP prices. When I purchase from abroad, I very very rarely pay in my local currency. The payment processor or (preferably) my bank performs the currency conversion, on my end of the transaction.
I fully suspect us to get different pricing. Until it was banned it was a classic cause of consumer frustration with Ryanair: getting to the payment step, and being charged extra to pay by credit card.
I suspect it'll also force many smaller retailers to stop taking card payments again, and requiring cash.
Ryanair most likely will try to use the new open banking push payment technology. This way the payment can't be reversed and its a faster payment under the hood (cheaper than a debit card for them).
It seems to me that merchants are paying a ton of money in card fees and waiting 2-3 days for the transaction to settle) whereas actually the transaction could be done for pennies and settle instantly via the UK's very good Faster Payments infrastructure. If this takes off with consumers, Visa and MasterCard are going to see big chunks taken out of their business.
Or take visa? Or any other credit provider? Or a debit card? Heaven forbid that we allow payment providers to compete to provide the best service at the cheapest price.
UK customers are alreay starting to get different pricing from EU ones as e-commerce platforms, and everyone else for that matter, adapt to the new rules (UK VAT at point of sale, customs paperwork, etc).
That being the case this is just a matter of increasing the price even more for UK customers (or EU customers in the UK), should a business decide it makes commercial sense.
Hmm, the cap is necessary if the fees are abusively high and hurt businesses, consumers, and competition, not just because people prefer to pay less.
I don't see how a change from 0.3% to 1.5% proves anything, especially that this is still abiding by the cap set for non-EEA transactions: The UK is no longer in the EEA so they have decided to apply that cap instead of the intra-EEA one, as is their fair and legal right.
* To highlight what EU regulations entail, here a limit on internal fees?
* Is it the reliance on large financial provider networks and an insight in their fees?
I am kind of curious, maybe because I feel that Schadenfreude posts (which was the main reaction when I saw it on reddit) are not exactly the content I expect on HN, but it is not my place to decide that.
edit: restructure comment in an attempt to highlight that this is not just "You shouldn't feel Schadenfreude".
Thanks for the response. I do see the applicability and their dominant market position. In what way is it a huge issue for many startups?
Personally I see issues for consumers on the one hand and companies that provide goods or services that are deemed "not acceptable" by the duopoly. So I'm interested in the issues many startups have.
Regarding the article, as far as I found out by googling a bit, they basically rais the fees to their non-internal-EU fees. (But that might not actually be the case.) So it feels less news worthy to me.
There's a lot to take from this development besides Schadenfreude, as I see it living far from Europe.
UK founders for one need to be made aware of this since it likely impacts their business directly. But also, from an economic perspective I find it very important as it highlights that MasterCard is in such a controlling position that they can price hike like this (and possibly more) as soon as they're able to, possibly indicating a lack of competition in the space. It's an interesting example of how consumer-helping rulesets are needed since clearly MC was doing fine before this hike.
It seems to be interesting to companies selling goods online in the EU to customers in the UK, so not neccessarily applicable to UK founders yet or I might have misunderstood the intro line:
> fees it charges EU merchants when UK cardholders buy goods and services from them online
But I get the idea, it's interesting to founders in the EU that want to sell to UK for a relevant part of their business.
If I got it correct, master card is basically returning to the fee set that is valid outside of the EU, aren't they? (1.5% compared to 0.3%) which was based on a regulation from 2015 (and there are other payment options that are even cheaper in that regard.)
I do strongly belief that it's a sector that needs regulations like this, but I also feel that this lesson has been available for awhile and is ignored on purpose (e.g., on philosophical reasons such that regulation should be avoided for ineffectiveness reasons)
Well, a large part of Hacker News userbase is from EU and UK, and buying from merchants located in other countries is quite usual. This will likely affect enough people in the site to be considered relevant.
Why would they want to do that? The company receiving the money (in the EU) is the one that receives less money. The UK bank receives a higher interchange.
Your typical shopify store charges the same stuff for everyone, you pick the country and pay at checkout. The only differentiator is shipping costs. So i don't understand the meaning when you say customers. The loser is the EU merchant shop and the winner is the British bank.
Everyone on this thread is jumping to the conclusion its some Brexit mania without looking into the detail of who receives the interchange and who pays it.
Why wouldn't the EU stores just jack up the UK shipping prices? You probably already need to do more just to get something sent out to the UK. Might as well lump all those costs in the shipping.
Most citizens will never notice the price difference. Any costs that get passed on will be rolled up into extra costs of doing business with U.K. now that we’ve left the EU.
The big ticket items there will be VAT, and customs duties, which are measured in 10’s of %. So realistically customers will never know to complain about this fee increase once the news cycles ends.
In the UK payment is moving away to even cheaper methods using Open Banking with Faster payments, which is technically near free - a bit like Giropay. So on the payment end there is an alternative coming better for merchants anyway.
I personally doubt that Open Banking is the answer here. Most open banking payment run over Faster Payments, which is owned by a company called VocaLink, which is in turn owned by (drum roll please) MasterCard.
If Open Banking takes off, then expect MasterCard to start increasing their Faster Payments fees (they exist, your bank just eats the cost).
But first you need to convince customers to give up the protections offered by Debit/Credit cards. There’s basically 0 recourse for a consumer to get their money back if they’re scammed via Open Banking. Unlike Credit/Debit cards where chargebacks are an option.
Mastercard are likely to not change the FPS fee as Vocalink is easy to supplant.
There are bigger issues at play set out for this coming decade. For example card not present transactions are going to have their fees jacked up (internet transactions) vs in store ones. The real battle will be against this.
Chargebacks not being possible are beneficial too, it depends on your merchant. For instance topping up your brokerage account with chargebacks possible would be very problematic.
> Mastercard are likely to not change the FPS fee as Vocalink is easy to supplant.
What on earth makes you think this is true? Do you have any idea how complex it is to set up an inter-bank payment scheme? Vocalink are not even remotely easy to supplant, banks will just pass the extra costs onto merchants and wash their hands of it. There’s no profit in providing free financial services.
> For example card not present transactions are going to have their fees jacked up
No doubt. MasterCard and Visa are both looking to make sure profits stay healthy. But if there’s something I know for sure, it’s that both companies know how to extract their pound of flesh. They’re masters of creating new fees, if they want to increase fees on card not present, then they will. If they can’t do it directly, they’ll find a way to do it indirectly.
> For instance topping up your brokerage account with chargebacks possible would be very problematic.
Chargebacks are not a simple one-size-fits-all thing. There are hundreds of pages of rules outline when you can and can’t raise chargebacks. There are also ways to allow merchants to immunise themselves against chargebacks.
It’s already possible to top up brokerage accounts using a Credit/Debit card. That’s because carve outs already exist in the chargeback rules which make it very difficult for a customer to raise a valid chargeback in those scenarios.
> What on earth makes you think this is true? Do you have any idea how complex it is to set up an inter-bank payment scheme? Vocalink are not even remotely easy to supplant, banks will just pass the extra costs onto merchants and wash their hands of it. There’s no profit in providing free financial services.
I know this industry quite well. Btw, this has already happened. NPSO now runs Faster payments not Vocalink anymore. Vocalink sells the stuff to banks to connect to NPSO & that helps square up card transactions too. You can also connect to NPSO directly using documented open ISO standards and not pay Vocalink anything.
Except VocaLink still own and operate FPS’s central infrastructure, that’s not going to change anytime soon. Even if there was the political will to change it, there isn’t really the technical capability. They also own the only real FPS payment gateway (although you don’t need to use them).
It’s true that Pay.UK sets the participants fees etc But it’s not hard to see them increasing them to help deal with fraud costs if Open Banking payment initiation takes off. I know this because I was involved in preventing the fees from being increased that last time this was proposed.
You can also bet money that MasterCard will use their ownership of VocaLink to find a way to increase their cut of FPS fees.
VAT is not a big change - you won't pay the EU member state VAT and instead will pay UK VAT. It's basically neutral, or in a few countries cheaper.
Custom fees are the big problem, which is basically profiteering from Royal Mail and co. I really doubt it costs £8-12 to clear a small package through UK customs (especially long term when the systems are bedded in more). For example, Amazon doesn't charge customs duties on goods from the EU coming into the UK, so my guess is it is actually very low cost. My hope is that over time there will be some competitiveness on customs fees.
You just have to read some of the past threads where people involved in logistics pop in, to realize that the costs are very significant indeed.
For one, it takes longer to clear packages, which increases your storage costs; and if a package is refused it cannot be sent back, it has to be stored for a very long time, again impacting profitability (you now need bigger warehouses).
Also there are additional checks, so more people involved - the relevant UK civil service has already expanded to deal with the increase in volume of bureaucracy, but actual couriers have not. That means they will be forced to hire more people, again raising costs.
That high cost of handling international custom-clearing packages is an average of actual immediate costs and predicted future costs.
I'm not saying there are no additional costs, they obviously are. What I'm saying is the current costs should come down in the UK. It has a ruthless courier marketplace.
Amazon is either eating the costs (possible, granted, but odd as they don't do it for other countries) or have got costs so low to clear that they're not charging customers for them. £12 to clear a small package is obviously way over the actual cost incurred by the delivery companies.
Still, the solution is quite easy, just increase the price for the GBP version. It can be just added to the currency conversion in the commerce system.
I don't understand how the price can be the same if the currencies are different.
Modern UK banks like Monzo tell you to pay in the currency of the store and let them do the conversion for you (at the interbank rate).. The only way really is to charge more for shipping.
How many consumers use a solution like that? Because if it's only a tiny percentage of all people, you could just raise the GBP prices with a comfortable margin and have those subsidize the rest.
I'm a bit unclear on how. So you have your ecommerce store charging in EUR, and you pay with your Monzo/Starling/Revolut whatever and get the interbank rate to GBP. How is the store going to pass costs onto consumers in a way other than shipping costs? You can't use currency because the bank has given you the interbank rate (and cut off the card's conversion fee).
Also btw if you let your card processor convert currency for you they're going to be even worse off as an EU store owner - Stripe charges 2% extra to convert your currency for example. So your fees are now going to be over 3.5%.. best to leave it in EUR.
You need to run an ecommerce store to understand its very hard to ask a customer their country first. Unless you're Apple..
Also when you run an ecommerce store you want US customers too, so your UK problem is equivalent to your US problem.
Mostly sobbing into my hands and wondering how over half the voting population managed to get hoodwinked into thinking that any of this might be a good idea, with a good outcome.
Can someone explain why that is even happening - I thought the 'deal' was meant to prevent that. Wasn't this what everyone was worried about happening with a hard Brexit?
So we don’t pay for tariffs, but there still plenty of other trade barriers that exist. Such as paying to have your goods checked as the cross the border. Or paying VAT as it crosses the border because we’re no longer part of the EU VAT system.
The deal we got is basically one notch short of the hardest possible Brexit. It’s barely a deal, just a face saving piece of toilet paper for Boris to cover himself with.
“Hard Brexit” is an Overton window which shifted a lot since the referendum campaign began.
Originally “Hard Brexit” meant leaving the Single Market and Customs Union, but May made doing anything less than that into “Brexit in name only” with her limited time in office. The final deal has the U.K. out of both, with some options for tariff-free trade if you filled out the right forms, but there aren’t enough customs experts to fill out all those forms even if it was a zero-cost exercise.
However this is just an interesting aside; regarding MasterCard fees, the explicit point of Brexit was to no longer be bound by EU rules, and so the UK (with huge caveats yet to be fully explored because the agreement has been TL;DRed by the U.K. government) is no longer required to follow rules like the one MasterCard IDs referring to here. (Probably. It’s a long document).
I think you may be overestimating the impact of this on 'normal' UK residents: We don't order stuff from the EU that often.
Now, as a country we do import a lot from the EU. The direct impact is on businesses, which might have a knock-on effect on inflation unless or until alternatives are found.
That's not my experience. Most people express sympathy. I think many people in the EU and EEA regard the UK as a sibling or cousin who has inexplicably taken to self harming.
I assure you we're not, most of us aren't at least. I feel sorry for everyone involved, including the EU.
I think the "throw that form in the bin" from B. Johnson last year was a low point of politics everywhere in the world and was a tell of a profound lack of empathy. I know some people will feel deseperate because of the new barriers (the Covid crisis did not help at all tbh), and luckily this one sentence is old enough so that not that many people will remember, but this is the kind of "advice" that can push a desperate person a little bit too far.
"I'm just joking" doesn't really work when you're an adult.
I would suspect though cannot prove that MasterCard are in cahoots with the UK government on this.
Same thing happened when EU tried to cap roaming charges and Vodafone complained that it was unfair because they'd paid so much for mobile spectrum licenses - the UK government lobbied not on behalf of citizens but on behalf of a corporation AGAINST caps on roaming charges.
They are only following the rules of the EU cap on fees:
There is one cap for intra-EEA transactions and one cap for extra-EEA transactions. The UK is no longer in the EEA so they have decide to apply the latter cap to these transactions.
When I travel from one town to another I don't pay different amounts for my phone calls or data. It should not be any different crossing a border within the EU.
It is absolutely fair, mobile operators were cross-charging ridiculous amounts to serve each others customers just so they could each milk the others customers. This type of price fixing was wrong and the EU put an end to it.
As far as I can tell the telcos have survived, they're still making money and investing in 5G and the consumers are paying less. How is that not a win-win other than for shareholders of the biggest telcos?
> It is entirely legal for a company to charge different prices in Germany and Greece, except if they're a phone operator. How is that fair?
Except this isn’t true. The EU mobile roaming rules have the concept of a home country. If you spend too much time outside of it then the operator is allowed to charge roaming costs. So it not really possible for a customer to take out a contract in Greece and then only use it in France.
The only exception to this rule exists for people living near borders. Where is quite likely they commute over that border, or their phone will randomly connect to towers on the other side of border.
Given the most of the EU is part of the Schengen Area, and living and working in different countries is not only common, but encouraged. It makes sense that EU enacts laws to prevent citizens from being economically punished for exercising their rights.
U.K. residents buying from the E.U. will pay more or the seller make less.
U.K. retailers gain an advantage over E.U. retailers.
Luxemborg's advantage over the U.K. as a corporate HQ location has decreased, which will make it easier to get companies like Amazon to re-locate or open a second office.
Higher costs will incentivize building better payment systems that break the current duopoly.
I think it was a directive. But it applied to transactions in the EEA. The U.K. isn’t in the EEA, so while the rule probably still exists in the U.K., it just doesn’t apply to anything anymore.
Those fees are in a contract between the merchant and the acquirer, which is fully under EU law, therefore, if the fee cap is on all transactions, it should apply to everyone, wherever they are.
I don't understand how does the location of the buyer affects the processing fees, unless either it is a more complicated issue involving all merchant, acquiring bank and issuing bank, or EU law explicitly caps transaction fees between EU citizens and EU companies, leaving out all international sales.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadOnly a narrow political class of Brexit true-believers are doing that, and it seems unfair to say they represent the UK in totality.
There are plenty of voices in the the UK who've warned about the economic consequences and even now are shining a light on the consequences of Brexit.
That happened once and people were right to be furious because the Dutch customs guy was a dick. No rule requires him to confiscate the lunch of lorry drivers and then say "Welcome to Brexit". It's that kind of nasty backstabbing pettiness that makes EU ideology so deeply unattractive that the UK voted to leave.
Nonetheless it's hilarious that so far despite the EU's best efforts to create as many problems as possible via "work to rule" type approaches, the media focuses on that. The EU-loving media class spent years telling people that if the UK dared to leave this horrible organisation there'd be immediate shortages of medicine. Now they have to hype up stories about dickish border guards whilst desperately trying to hide the fact that literally weeks after Brexit happened there are medicine shortages in the EU. People who argued against Brexit have been wrong about so many things so far I shouldn't be surprised but that one still takes the biscuit.
Actually, a rule does require him to confiscate any meat product that someone might try to bring into the EU [1] (incidentally I believe that the USA have the same rule), which is what happened: It was a ham sandwich.
If you watch the video the driver was very surprised. Personally I took the customs guy's reply "welcome to Brexit" as a humorous but factual and to the point explanation.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/carry/meat-dair....
Look, this is very simple: if the EU's rules require confiscating the lunch of people who are trying to do business, then the rules are wrong and should be fixed. Blaming Brexit or saying "the USA does it too" isn't a great answer when it'd be so easy to fix this.
I think the main thing I've been learning about import/export rules in/out of the EU in the past few weeks is how much life must have been sucking for years for people trying to trade with us who aren't physically in Europe. A huge number of the rules that are tripping people up are stuff that's just taken to an absurd bureaucratic extreme, like the guys who couldn't sell their fish because the Latin name on a form had a spelling error, or the others who needed to translate their product description into every single European language before they could put their goods on a lorry.
The EU could easily fix all these things and make the lives of not only Brits but everyone else easier too, but the so-called single market is basically the only argument they have for why a country should join the EU. The EU has created a perverse incentive for itself to make selling things to it as convoluted and painful as possible. That is ultimately bad for everyone, but especially for people who live and work in member states.
How did Covid start and spread? Through movement of infected meat and people. I also think you really don't understand the job of a border controller.
As for spread of people, truckers have been allowed to cross borders even when they've been closed the whole time, as otherwise supply chains would collapse. So it's irrelevant to this case. The guy wasn't doing a COVID check.
I also think you really don't understand the job of a border controller.
I think I do! Political trolling and lunch confiscation are definitely not components of it.
This is not something I or any other sane American can fix. It will take generations to root out this nonsense. Until parents/communities stop teaching their children bigotry and racism and scarcity mindset are good - we will lose this battle. It starts with the kids.
And, I think we will really know after a couple of years if this was a “mistake”. Being in the EU feels often like a “mistake”, too. I am not thinking my country should leave, but I’d love to see a major reform making the EU much lighter, less bureaucratic and focused on core topics instead of being this gigantic monster that’s deciding which popups I need to see.
The choice of matters discussed at EU level is sadly due to the agenda of national states, for the major part; in a lot of cases it’s actually what they don’t feel brave enough to touch but still think “something should be done about”, so the EU provides plausible deniability. If you feel this is not to your likes, complain to your MEPs and your national MPs.
Personally I think some issues won’t be solved until we have more European authority rather than less; a bit like the US ended up moving most powers to the federal government during its first 150 years.
This might very well be true. However, it is not only about costs, is it? I really doubt that the cost-benefit ratio is on the same level as my national one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/24/scotland-in...
If there is any truth to that it's a big vindication of Brexit and I say that as a remain voter.
The loss of the UK is nothing but a sad occasion, because everyone in the UK and the EU is weakened as a result.
The "downside" (from an US point of view) on this cap is that European credit cards don't have ridiculous card bonus programs that are in reality subsidized by all people not paying by credit cards.
I used to work in a PC retail/repair shop and the reason we didn't take amex wasn't because of the fees, it was because they held the balances for longer than Visa/MC, and occasionally we had bills to pay in that time period too!
For Mastercard/Visa you will have at lease three entities involved:
1. The retailer
2. The card network Mastercard/Visa
3. The card issuer (the customers bank)
Amex dodge this by being both the card network and the issuer. So there are only two parties involved in their transactions.
1. The retailer
2. Amex
So they charge a much higher interchange than Mastercard/Visa can. Which is also the reason why there will never be an Amex competitor in Europe. No merchant would ever sign up to anew card network that charged more and had no customers. Equally no customer would signup for card they couldn’t use anywhere.
For most people not having to deal with the details makes Stripe worth it. But once to get to a certain scale it becomes much cheaper to use a competitor, and just have people working full time on understanding and managing the fees involved.
I've never even had a credit card. I just have a debit card that allows me to spend the money in my account (plus a limited overdraft of about €1000). I've never seen the point of anything else and I'd be suspicious as hell if a bank offered me a credit card with a reward program.
It's actually pretty reckless using debit cards for larger purchases for this reason, especially given the current economic climate. You should (IMO) always pay with a credit card then pay the full balance off via direct debit every month.
I wonder what all the EU citizens think who are not getting vaccinated because the EU thought it would play hard ball with the drug companies, who basically went elsewhere as they don't care about EU bureaucratic games?
What do you mean? Current vaccination plan is 80% of population by summer, isn't it?
For all the many times the UK dropped the ball over this pandemic (and separately over Brexit), the British health systems — both NHS and private — are actually good at vaccinating people. For example, last time I visited friends in the country, I got a seasonal flu vaccine from a supermarket without an appointment.
Equally, any EU member state could have chosen to go their own way. The EU didn't force them to collectively bargain to (successfully) get better value deals.
Maybe the EU will do a worse job distributing, but it's too early to say.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
(As a Brit, I'm pleasantly surprised how smoothly our vaccine roll out is going so far!)
You think it's an anomaly that EU countries are below UK and the US (despite the publicised failure of the Trump regime to plan for this)?
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/angela-merkel-defends-joint-...
"From October, Mastercard said it would increase these fees to 1.5% on every transaction, up from 0.3%. The EU introduced a cap on such fees in 2015 after concerns they pushed prices up for consumers and unfairly burdened companies."
"Mastercard is implementing the rises simply as it's no longer bound by the restrictions imposed by the UK being in the EU."
Thus proving the caps were indeed necessary. If MC was making money with a 0.3% fee the other 1.2% are pure sweet profit margin.
It is more likely there are significant regulatory or other burdens taking UK orders for EU goods.
Also, I think it's important to remember but most of us don't go and select Mastercard or Visa, most of us don't care. We just use what the banks use. I suspect changing from Mastercard to Visa would be extremely expensive and it's a lot easier and more profitable to just pass along that to the customer.
You got the consumer part wrong. The consumer is the merchant, which can decide if they allow Mastercard cards or not. Same as many merchants don't accept Amex. It's because they don't like to pay the Amex fee. Same as many merchants don't accept Apple Pay or Android Pay or why some merchants only allow card payments for purchases of a minimum amount.
Merchants are the consumers and they decide what cards they will accept. Based on what cards they will accept consumers will be picky about which cards they want to have. For those exact reasons I have a VISA credit card as well as an AMEX because I sometimes can't use my AMEX, otherwise I wouldn't even have a VISA CC.
Also Apple Pay and Android Pay don’t cost merchants more to implement or use (assuming they have the HW, which any card reader from the past 10 years will have). The card network rules also forbid merchants from not accepting them, but of course rules don’t mean much without enforcement.
Finally there is really only one company that can undercut Mastercard, and that’s Visa. It’s only a question of time before Visa bump their fees, there’s no way they’re gonna leave money on the table for long.
Is it also legal to charge customers a fee based on what type of card they use? A large number of customers have multiple cards anyway, so that would be a meaningful incentive.
Are we living in the same world? Visa+MC are a duopoly borderlining being a de facto cartel organization and handle the vast majority of all retail transactions in the world.
The margins are extreme, but so are the barriers to entry. To build a new card network you somehow need to convince a bunch of banks and merchants to support your card network. Good luck with that.
The EU even forced Mastercard to allow others to start a card network running over their infrastructure, after they bought EuroPay. But it’s so hard to get people to actually use a new card network, that no ones actually bothered to try.
Weren't they supposed to have turned all existing EU law into UK law anyway as a starting point? Maybe phone operators will be next on this train.
I also don't understand how this 'free trade' deal seems to still be costing businesses so much money in customs fees? Isn't the point of a free trade deal that you don't pay customs?
At least Boris Johnson got the Coronavirus pandemic right, oh wait...
The free trade agreement is different, and a step down from that. Given the amount of trade I think the customs fees will come down significantly over time once things are bedded in a bit more.
they were supposed to transcribe all the EU regulations and law into UK law, but they also granted themselves power to change lots of it via regulation (ie without going to parliament)...it's unclear what specifically happened here.
On the other hand, there are many cash back bonuses.
The EU has so much bargaining power that countries like the UAE or Israel could never get hold of more vaccines than the EU -.-
The EU has a population of about 447 million.
Seems like these two countries are 2% of EU in terms of population.
If I have 5000 guests, I have to find a beer maker who can make and deliver 5000 beers by a given date. The difference in the challenge is obvious, to any rational observer.
But sure, from far enough, both things can be described as "buying beers for guests".
It's about as apples-to-oranges as you can get.
What happened is what always happens when you really want something but are not in a position to negotiate: You end up paying a lot of money. Israel is said to be paying $47 for the Pfizer vaccine while the US are paying $19.50, and the EU... $14.76. [1]
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-to-be-paying-avera...
It can only be in the shipping cost.
Also if you are a British consumer simply pay in Euros, and let your card do the conversion for you - you typically get the interbank rate with most modern banks.
I suspect it'll also force many smaller retailers to stop taking card payments again, and requiring cash.
It seems to me that merchants are paying a ton of money in card fees and waiting 2-3 days for the transaction to settle) whereas actually the transaction could be done for pennies and settle instantly via the UK's very good Faster Payments infrastructure. If this takes off with consumers, Visa and MasterCard are going to see big chunks taken out of their business.
That being the case this is just a matter of increasing the price even more for UK customers (or EU customers in the UK), should a business decide it makes commercial sense.
So the loser seems to be UK shops.
Hmm, the cap is necessary if the fees are abusively high and hurt businesses, consumers, and competition, not just because people prefer to pay less.
I don't see how a change from 0.3% to 1.5% proves anything, especially that this is still abiding by the cap set for non-EEA transactions: The UK is no longer in the EEA so they have decided to apply that cap instead of the intra-EEA one, as is their fair and legal right.
* Is it Schadenfreude?
* To highlight what EU regulations entail, here a limit on internal fees?
* Is it the reliance on large financial provider networks and an insight in their fees?
I am kind of curious, maybe because I feel that Schadenfreude posts (which was the main reaction when I saw it on reddit) are not exactly the content I expect on HN, but it is not my place to decide that.
edit: restructure comment in an attempt to highlight that this is not just "You shouldn't feel Schadenfreude".
Visa and Mastercard's defacto monopoly is a huge issue for many startups, and therefore this is directly relevant.
I think a head of steam is beginning to build that V/MC is a situation that cannot be allowed to continue as is.
Personally I see issues for consumers on the one hand and companies that provide goods or services that are deemed "not acceptable" by the duopoly. So I'm interested in the issues many startups have.
Regarding the article, as far as I found out by googling a bit, they basically rais the fees to their non-internal-EU fees. (But that might not actually be the case.) So it feels less news worthy to me.
UK founders for one need to be made aware of this since it likely impacts their business directly. But also, from an economic perspective I find it very important as it highlights that MasterCard is in such a controlling position that they can price hike like this (and possibly more) as soon as they're able to, possibly indicating a lack of competition in the space. It's an interesting example of how consumer-helping rulesets are needed since clearly MC was doing fine before this hike.
> fees it charges EU merchants when UK cardholders buy goods and services from them online
But I get the idea, it's interesting to founders in the EU that want to sell to UK for a relevant part of their business.
If I got it correct, master card is basically returning to the fee set that is valid outside of the EU, aren't they? (1.5% compared to 0.3%) which was based on a regulation from 2015 (and there are other payment options that are even cheaper in that regard.)
I do strongly belief that it's a sector that needs regulations like this, but I also feel that this lesson has been available for awhile and is ignored on purpose (e.g., on philosophical reasons such that regulation should be avoided for ineffectiveness reasons)
Everyone on this thread is jumping to the conclusion its some Brexit mania without looking into the detail of who receives the interchange and who pays it.
The big ticket items there will be VAT, and customs duties, which are measured in 10’s of %. So realistically customers will never know to complain about this fee increase once the news cycles ends.
If Open Banking takes off, then expect MasterCard to start increasing their Faster Payments fees (they exist, your bank just eats the cost).
But first you need to convince customers to give up the protections offered by Debit/Credit cards. There’s basically 0 recourse for a consumer to get their money back if they’re scammed via Open Banking. Unlike Credit/Debit cards where chargebacks are an option.
There are bigger issues at play set out for this coming decade. For example card not present transactions are going to have their fees jacked up (internet transactions) vs in store ones. The real battle will be against this.
Chargebacks not being possible are beneficial too, it depends on your merchant. For instance topping up your brokerage account with chargebacks possible would be very problematic.
What on earth makes you think this is true? Do you have any idea how complex it is to set up an inter-bank payment scheme? Vocalink are not even remotely easy to supplant, banks will just pass the extra costs onto merchants and wash their hands of it. There’s no profit in providing free financial services.
> For example card not present transactions are going to have their fees jacked up
No doubt. MasterCard and Visa are both looking to make sure profits stay healthy. But if there’s something I know for sure, it’s that both companies know how to extract their pound of flesh. They’re masters of creating new fees, if they want to increase fees on card not present, then they will. If they can’t do it directly, they’ll find a way to do it indirectly.
> For instance topping up your brokerage account with chargebacks possible would be very problematic.
Chargebacks are not a simple one-size-fits-all thing. There are hundreds of pages of rules outline when you can and can’t raise chargebacks. There are also ways to allow merchants to immunise themselves against chargebacks.
It’s already possible to top up brokerage accounts using a Credit/Debit card. That’s because carve outs already exist in the chargeback rules which make it very difficult for a customer to raise a valid chargeback in those scenarios.
I know this industry quite well. Btw, this has already happened. NPSO now runs Faster payments not Vocalink anymore. Vocalink sells the stuff to banks to connect to NPSO & that helps square up card transactions too. You can also connect to NPSO directly using documented open ISO standards and not pay Vocalink anything.
[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/2018/may/consolidation-...
It’s true that Pay.UK sets the participants fees etc But it’s not hard to see them increasing them to help deal with fraud costs if Open Banking payment initiation takes off. I know this because I was involved in preventing the fees from being increased that last time this was proposed.
You can also bet money that MasterCard will use their ownership of VocaLink to find a way to increase their cut of FPS fees.
Custom fees are the big problem, which is basically profiteering from Royal Mail and co. I really doubt it costs £8-12 to clear a small package through UK customs (especially long term when the systems are bedded in more). For example, Amazon doesn't charge customs duties on goods from the EU coming into the UK, so my guess is it is actually very low cost. My hope is that over time there will be some competitiveness on customs fees.
For one, it takes longer to clear packages, which increases your storage costs; and if a package is refused it cannot be sent back, it has to be stored for a very long time, again impacting profitability (you now need bigger warehouses).
Also there are additional checks, so more people involved - the relevant UK civil service has already expanded to deal with the increase in volume of bureaucracy, but actual couriers have not. That means they will be forced to hire more people, again raising costs.
That high cost of handling international custom-clearing packages is an average of actual immediate costs and predicted future costs.
Amazon is either eating the costs (possible, granted, but odd as they don't do it for other countries) or have got costs so low to clear that they're not charging customers for them. £12 to clear a small package is obviously way over the actual cost incurred by the delivery companies.
I don't understand how the price can be the same if the currencies are different.
Also btw if you let your card processor convert currency for you they're going to be even worse off as an EU store owner - Stripe charges 2% extra to convert your currency for example. So your fees are now going to be over 3.5%.. best to leave it in EUR.
You need to run an ecommerce store to understand its very hard to ask a customer their country first. Unless you're Apple..
Also when you run an ecommerce store you want US customers too, so your UK problem is equivalent to your US problem.
Geo filter? I'm not sure what commerce store you are running, but that's usually the first thing that's happening.
Anyways you can set shipping costs however you want for each country.
These are all trivial things.
Now having to pay import duty/VAT on EU imports plus a ~£10 handling fee for delivery company handling.
It seems like the cost of living is increasing.
So we don’t pay for tariffs, but there still plenty of other trade barriers that exist. Such as paying to have your goods checked as the cross the border. Or paying VAT as it crosses the border because we’re no longer part of the EU VAT system.
The deal we got is basically one notch short of the hardest possible Brexit. It’s barely a deal, just a face saving piece of toilet paper for Boris to cover himself with.
I think a fair conclusion is that the government didn't have interest in getting a good deal or sorting out potential issues.
https://amp.ft.com/content/cc6b0d9a-d8cc-4ddb-8c57-726df018c...
Originally “Hard Brexit” meant leaving the Single Market and Customs Union, but May made doing anything less than that into “Brexit in name only” with her limited time in office. The final deal has the U.K. out of both, with some options for tariff-free trade if you filled out the right forms, but there aren’t enough customs experts to fill out all those forms even if it was a zero-cost exercise.
However this is just an interesting aside; regarding MasterCard fees, the explicit point of Brexit was to no longer be bound by EU rules, and so the UK (with huge caveats yet to be fully explored because the agreement has been TL;DRed by the U.K. government) is no longer required to follow rules like the one MasterCard IDs referring to here. (Probably. It’s a long document).
Now, as a country we do import a lot from the EU. The direct impact is on businesses, which might have a knock-on effect on inflation unless or until alternatives are found.
Mobile roaming fees will be the next thing to go up. We voted for this, and the EU is laughing at us. (Who can blame them?)
That's not my experience. Most people express sympathy. I think many people in the EU and EEA regard the UK as a sibling or cousin who has inexplicably taken to self harming.
I assure you we're not, most of us aren't at least. I feel sorry for everyone involved, including the EU.
I think the "throw that form in the bin" from B. Johnson last year was a low point of politics everywhere in the world and was a tell of a profound lack of empathy. I know some people will feel deseperate because of the new barriers (the Covid crisis did not help at all tbh), and luckily this one sentence is old enough so that not that many people will remember, but this is the kind of "advice" that can push a desperate person a little bit too far.
"I'm just joking" doesn't really work when you're an adult.
Maybe that's true. Either way, I'm yet to see the promised benefits. I doubt they'll ever exist.
Same thing happened when EU tried to cap roaming charges and Vodafone complained that it was unfair because they'd paid so much for mobile spectrum licenses - the UK government lobbied not on behalf of citizens but on behalf of a corporation AGAINST caps on roaming charges.
There is one cap for intra-EEA transactions and one cap for extra-EEA transactions. The UK is no longer in the EEA so they have decide to apply the latter cap to these transactions.
It is entirely legal for a company to charge different prices in Germany and Greece, except if they're a phone operator. How is that fair?
It is absolutely fair, mobile operators were cross-charging ridiculous amounts to serve each others customers just so they could each milk the others customers. This type of price fixing was wrong and the EU put an end to it.
As far as I can tell the telcos have survived, they're still making money and investing in 5G and the consumers are paying less. How is that not a win-win other than for shareholders of the biggest telcos?
Except this isn’t true. The EU mobile roaming rules have the concept of a home country. If you spend too much time outside of it then the operator is allowed to charge roaming costs. So it not really possible for a customer to take out a contract in Greece and then only use it in France.
The only exception to this rule exists for people living near borders. Where is quite likely they commute over that border, or their phone will randomly connect to towers on the other side of border.
Given the most of the EU is part of the Schengen Area, and living and working in different countries is not only common, but encouraged. It makes sense that EU enacts laws to prevent citizens from being economically punished for exercising their rights.
U.K. retailers gain an advantage over E.U. retailers.
Luxemborg's advantage over the U.K. as a corporate HQ location has decreased, which will make it easier to get companies like Amazon to re-locate or open a second office.
Higher costs will incentivize building better payment systems that break the current duopoly.
But this fee cap wasn’t a directive? What other EU regulations were never directives, and are going to evaporate now we are post Brexit?