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How to get around merchant fees?

1 points by Agunderman10 ↗ HN
Merchant fees are so ridiculously high and I don't understand why. This is mostly for credit card fees which are often 2-3% per transaction. It's insane. Has anyone tried building an alternative payments solution? Why didn't it work?

4 comments

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outdig
because they can. because of a monopoly.

you can accept alternative payments like cryptocurrency or venmo or something, but let's face it, most customers prefer to pay with a credit card. that's how monopolies work.

wmf
ACH is cheaper but the onboarding UX is worse. Maybe FedNow will solve this but probably not.
bell-cot
"Cash or Check"

Decades ago, for large companies, another traditional way to dodge merchant fees was to have your own $Company_Name credit card. (Which was not a "branded" Visa or MasterCard, but their own exclusive payment networks & systems.)

anonym29
Cryptocurrency has fees higher than cash/check, lower than credit cards, but on-chain transactions (e.g., BTC, not LN) tend to have a clearing time longer than both cash and card.