I’m a merchant myself, I sell e-paper calendars. Last year I paid about 4% of my revenue for transaction costs in various shapes. That’s very roughly 20% of my margin. (!) Some of these are hidden as very bad, but non-optional, currency conversions.
The hard one here is acceptance by customers. No merchant wants to clutter their checkout page with a button that nobody understands.
Or worse, have customers get trapped in a dead-end payment process.
Another way to think about this is in terms of how many marginal customers you get from being able to accept payments over the Web. 4% starts sounding less bad
You can make the same argument for, say, paying protection money to the Mafia or for paying the 30% apple tax.
Just because it’s rational to pay off a monopolistic rent seeker doesn’t mean that the rent seeker generates economic value corresponding to the monopolistic rents they’re extracting.
The hard one here is acceptance by customers. No merchant wants to clutter their checkout page with a button that nobody understands. Or worse, have customers get trapped in a dead-end payment process.