I still buy occasionally as some things are so much cheaper. I was looking at Hammerite paint yesterday, Amazon UK price £16/litre, Leroy Merlin €30/litre.
To be fair lots of people have been forecasting this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the first of a stream, it was a ridiculous decision to not stick to the EU cap on interchange fees, this isn’t Amazon’s doing don’t forget. It’s also worth remembering of course that Amazon is a data business. I’m no fan by any means but they’ve obviously done this precisely because they’ve looked at how many transactions they have with visa credit, how many people they conservatively estimate will just choose a different payment method, how many sales they will lose altogether and set all against how much extra they will pay in increased interchange fees.
Amazon just sent email (same as JohnBoy got) saying they aren’t going to be accepting Visa credit cards in the future. Too expensive, they say.
Do I give up the evil empire that is Visa or the evil empire that is Amazon - hard choice 
Its called greed, all the very wealthy have it.
My wife and I received an email from NatWest a couple of weeks ago, informing us that they will be replacing our Visa cards with Mastercard ones.
My bank did the same, you get less protection with debit cards though so I’m going to have to stop buying from Amazon (probably unlikely, whatever I think about them) or get a new credit card.
Nothing to do with Brexit. Amazon have stopped allowing customers to use Visa because of Visa’s hike in fees.
2 Likes
I didn’t think it did (have anything to do with Brexit).
So why post it under the Brexit topic?
The topic is “Amazon.uk 2021” is it not? That doesn’t seem to me to be Brexit specific. Plus I wasn’t the first to mention it.
The category is Brexit - see the small black square under the heading. In fact my comment wasn’t addressed to you Billy I was just replying to the thread. Maybe @JohnBoy thought it had something to do with Brexit?
To be fair it’s EXACTLY because of Brexit as until January the U.K. had to stick to the interchange caps the EU sets, due to brexit Visa and MasterCard have been allowed to change this, going from 0.3% to 1.5% (ish, these figures are off the top of my head so may be wrong) a big jump for a low margin company like Amazon which makes much of its money from things like cloud platform AWS, and not a great deal of profit (‘not a great deal’ when taking into account that we’re discussing one of the biggest companies in the world of course) when selling consumers items online.
Yes, but - a) it is, as you observe, small and b) thread drift is a thing and c) @kirsteastevenson has just identified it is, in fact, due to Brexit anyway.
Frankly… it is definitiely because of Brexit that I am muting quite a few threads… 
1 Like
Crikey Sue, seems I’m in trouble with the forum police now! I assumed nothing other than to scroll down open topics and found this thread title, simple. Not long ago I started a new topic and was reminded there was a similar one already running although my title and the existing one didn’t match so I asked @james to remove mine which he did.
This time I think the existing title of Amazon 2021 fits exactly to continue with.
Yes I saw the Brexit box but i feel sure that most are attracted firstly to the large title rather than the small box that denotes the category, perhaps it’s just me.
Heavens, that wasn’t what I intended. My original comment was merely an observation in case people thought it was just because we were in France and it was yet another Brexit barrier, rather than being something that Amazon was implementing across the board.
Obviously I didn’t make myself clear, to you or to @billybutcher - sorry.
1 Like
I think there are two separate issues here - unavoidable increased costs due to Brexit and companies increasing charges because they’re now free from EU price constrictions. Clearly VISA have gambled on the latter and Amazon have said get stuffed, Mastercard though will no doubt be very happy.
1 Like
The reason this is interesting is that MasterCard are also increasing interchange fees by the same amount, so it’s rather intriguing as to why they’ve dumped Visa and kept MasterCard rather than the other way round. I wonder if they got some kind of sweeteners from MC somewhere which made them the preference, the only other difference I have managed to find was this:
In contrast to Mastercard, Visa will apply the updated interchange fee rates bilaterally . This implies that both transactions with UK-issued cards at EEA merchants and EEA-issued cards at UK merchants will receive the updated interchange rates.
Since October 19th 2019, Visa has removed the returned interchange for interregional refunds in the EEA. As of October 16th 2021, interchange will no longer be returned for consumer refund transactions between the UK and the EEA both for card-present and card-not-present. This change will also be applied bilaterally. Interchange rates for commercial cards will remain unchanged.
Amazon’s reward card is backed by Mastercard!
1 Like
Indeed it is! I hadn’t thought of that, although I think it’s just a relabelled NewDay card just as Argos, Tui and AO have and NewDay just happen to issue MasterCards rather than something that is specifically Amazon working with MasterCard directly.