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I'm sorry but as a Mexican I found this comment hilarious, cards are accepted almost everywhere, even in some street market stalls.
So did I.
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Apple can't really do much about retailers that don't accept contactless/Apple Pay. Some of them, like Walmart, have chosen to keep Apple Pay and contactless out so that you use their payment app (Walmart Pay). Apple can only say to retailers "hey, we make things easier and more convenient, so please use contactless". Contactless payments aren't even Apple-specific, it works with Google Pay and some credit cards have RFID embedded, so really Apple and others just have to say "use this standardized technology please!" Also Samsung Pay isn't really per se accepted at stores, it uses MST technology to emulate a card swipe, so to "accept" Samsung Pay you just need to take credit card swipes. Apple uses NFC technology which has to be built into the reader and enabled in software.
Actually all mobile payments use NFC, and so do contactless cards. Only Samsung has the technology to emulate a card swipe because they bought it from its original creator.
 
Apple can only say to retailers "hey, we make things easier and more convenient, so please use contactless".

Who can change that is the card networks, and indeed in Europe, Visa and Mastercard have mandated contactless support as of this past Jan 1.

Also Samsung Pay isn't really per se accepted at stores, it uses MST technology to emulate a card swipe, so to "accept" Samsung Pay you just need to take credit card swipes

Not really. Magstripe support is still mandated and universal in the US, particularly as some pin debit cards as well as prepaid/gift cards have not gone to EMV. The terminal cannot choose not to accept a magstripe, rather it forces the highest level of security. The MST card is encoded to say that magstripe is the highest level of security available. MST counts as a dynamic security measure, so fraud is treated like an EMV card.
 
Pin debit works perfectly fine over Apple Pay/NFC, assuming the merchant's hardware is properly set up. I think the Durbin amendment requires support.

Even if the bank or debit network can't handle EMV, the terminal just reads the track 2 equivalent data from contactless and it behaves identical to a swiped card.

The issuer has to support routing over two unaffiliated networks, but nothing says that the merchant has to be able to--only that they have the option of how to route. There's a lot of hardware and software out there that only supports the credit card networks (for example, Square), so in a fair number of cases merchants will have to switch payment processors and/or POS systems to be able to. I can see why some would think that disabling NFC would be a lot easier, especially if it's something that's not expected to be universally supported.
 
The issuer has to support routing over two unaffiliated networks, but nothing says that the merchant has to be able to--only that they have the option of how to route. There's a lot of hardware and software out there that only supports the credit card networks (for example, Square), so in a fair number of cases merchants will have to switch payment processors and/or POS systems to be able to. I can see why some would think that disabling NFC would be a lot easier, especially if it's something that's not expected to be universally supported.

As I said, the point is that it's the merchant's problem if they can't route to an alternate pin debit network over NFC, not Apple, the card network, or the issuer's. Everybody else, except the merchant and their providers, are required by law to support it.
 
Its still barely used in Norway, only maybe 3 or 4 banks use it. I have a Nordea bank that uses it and a Komplett Bank one but my main bank Sparebanken Vest dont :(
 
Fake news alert!

Merchants couldn't have told you this because they don't pay ANY Apple Pay fees! The only fee, .015%, or about 15 cents on a $100 purchase, is charged to the bank processing it, (BTW banks don't mind paying this tiny amount as it is more than offset by the reduction in fraud, which is why nearly every single bank, credit union, etc., in the US has signed up to participate. ) Apple Pay is FREE for merchants to use it.

Fake news alert!

It may be FAKE NEWS but you better let the folks know its fake at Cracker Barrel and some Chinese Restaurant I ate at the other night. That is their words not mine. When I was a small business owner, it cost me to accept credit cards. It was one fee to swipe the card and a higher fee if I manually entered the information. So I know they charge 4%+ for transaction fees. Whether Apple charges I don't know but I'm sure Apple doesn't do anything for free.
 
Actually all mobile payments use NFC, and so do contactless cards. Only Samsung has the technology to emulate a card swipe because they bought it from its original creator.

Contactless cards are actually RFID. NFC emulates an RFID card but is meant to be built into mobile phones (where it has a power source, as compared to cards that don't need a power source).

Also, LG Pay is now doing the same thing Samsung Pay does, it also can emulate a card swipe.

NFC standards cover communications protocols and data exchange formats and are based on existing radio-frequency identification (RFID) standards including ISO/IEC 14443 and FeliCa.[7] The standards include ISO/IEC 18092[8] and those defined by the NFC Forum. In addition to the NFC Forum, the GSMA group defined a platform for the deployment of GSMA NFC Standards[9] within mobile handsets. GSMA's efforts include Trusted Services Manager,[10] Single Wire Protocol, testing/certification and secure element.[11]
 
Contactless cards are actually RFID. NFC emulates an RFID card but is meant to be built into mobile phones (where it has a power source, as compared to cards that don't need a power source).

Also, LG Pay is now doing the same thing Samsung Pay does, it also can emulate a card swipe.


I meant that contactless cards use the exact same contactless reader as all mobile phones or wearables that can make payments, and only samsung and lg devices can use another reader, which is the magnetic stripe reader.
 
It may be FAKE NEWS but you better let the folks know its fake at Cracker Barrel and some Chinese Restaurant I ate at the other night. That is their words not mine. When I was a small business owner, it cost me to accept credit cards. It was one fee to swipe the card and a higher fee if I manually entered the information. So I know they charge 4%+ for transaction fees. Whether Apple charges I don't know but I'm sure Apple doesn't do anything for free.

Apple charges a fee to the banks, not to the merchants. Merchants can accept Apple Pay without any kind of agreement with Apple, you just need to accept contactless payments which is a standardized payment system, not specific to Apple at all.

Not sure though if you want to advertise that you accept Apple Pay if Apple charges you for displaying their logo. Some stores around me have Apple Pay logos in the store window and on the reader screens, it's possible you pay for the right to use their logo, but other than that, you can accept Apple Pay without plastering Apple logos everywhere.

And as I said, it's charged to the banks, not merchants, the main attraction for banks to pay the additional fee is that it cuts down on fraud. Chip cards also cut down on fraud since they aren't using the card number and can't be skimmed like the magstripe can, but they still let you take the card and use it without a PIN, in the US at least, where chip and PIN is very very rare. But Apple Pay uses biometrics or passcode authentication on the phone which is hard to by-pass and helps cut fraud even further, so many banks are willing to pay the fee associated with it. Though with chip combined with fraud detection tech it's not as attractive any more, so it's more associated with convenience than fraud prevention.
 
It may be FAKE NEWS but you better let the folks know its fake at Cracker Barrel and some Chinese Restaurant I ate at the other night. That is their words not mine. When I was a small business owner, it cost me to accept credit cards. It was one fee to swipe the card and a higher fee if I manually entered the information. So I know they charge 4%+ for transaction fees. Whether Apple charges I don't know but I'm sure Apple doesn't do anything for free.

The point here is that merchants don’t have to pay any fee specifically for apple pay. Otherwise, apple pay wouldn’t be accepted at all by merchants accepting contactless payment in the countries where Apple hasn’t officially rolled out the service, like it is.
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Apple charges a fee to the banks, not to the merchants. Merchants can accept Apple Pay without any kind of agreement with Apple, you just need to accept contactless payments which is a standardized payment system, not specific to Apple at all.

Not sure though if you want to advertise that you accept Apple Pay if Apple charges you for displaying their logo. Some stores around me have Apple Pay logos in the store window and on the reader screens, it's possible you pay for the right to use their logo, but other than that, you can accept Apple Pay without plastering Apple logos everywhere.

And as I said, it's charged to the banks, not merchants, the main attraction for banks to pay the additional fee is that it cuts down on fraud. Chip cards also cut down on fraud since they aren't using the card number and can't be skimmed like the magstripe can, but they still let you take the card and use it without a PIN, in the US at least, where chip and PIN is very very rare. But Apple Pay uses biometrics or passcode authentication on the phone which is hard to by-pass and helps cut fraud even further, so many banks are willing to pay the fee associated with it. Though with chip combined with fraud detection tech it's not as attractive any more, so it's more associated with convenience than fraud prevention.
Apple doesn’t charge for the apple pay stickers. Businesses can order them free at a special website Apple has. https://www.applepaysupplies.com/home
 
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As I said, the point is that it's the merchant's problem if they can't route to an alternate pin debit network over NFC, not Apple, the card network, or the issuer's. Everybody else, except the merchant and their providers, are required by law to support it.

I'm not disagreeing. Just mentioning a possible reason why people might think they have to pay Apple for the privilege of accepting NFC. Merchant billing statements aren't the clearest as it is, after all.

The point here is that merchants don’t have to pay any fee specifically for apple pay. Otherwise, apple pay wouldn’t be accepted at all by merchants accepting contactless payment in the countries where Apple hasn’t officially rolled out the service, like it is.

Depends. If it's a country that restricts interchange fees (like the EU), any extra fee that Apple would somehow charge merchants might not be enough to bother explicitly disabling. Not that it's likely that it'd happen at all due to how contactless payment works, of course.
 
It may be FAKE NEWS but you better let the folks know its fake at Cracker Barrel and some Chinese Restaurant I ate at the other night. That is their words not mine. When I was a small business owner, it cost me to accept credit cards. It was one fee to swipe the card and a higher fee if I manually entered the information. So I know they charge 4%+ for transaction fees. Whether Apple charges I don't know but I'm sure Apple doesn't do anything for free.

It is FAKE NEWS. Apple charges the card issuers. The card issuers only get a set cut from merchant transactions, dictated by the card networks, Visa and Mastercard. The cut does not depend on whether the transaction is contactless, magstripe, or chip. (As long as it's not key entered)

It does depend whether it's a debit, standard, rewards, or business card, and it does depend on the type of business the merchant is, and it does depend if the card is present or not.

This is what the cut is: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-reimbursement-fees.pdf
 
It may be FAKE NEWS but you better let the folks know its fake at Cracker Barrel and some Chinese Restaurant I ate at the other night. That is their words not mine. When I was a small business owner, it cost me to accept credit cards. It was one fee to swipe the card and a higher fee if I manually entered the information. So I know they charge 4%+ for transaction fees. Whether Apple charges I don't know but I'm sure Apple doesn't do anything for free.


Apple does many things for free, starting with giving away its operating systems and major software. In this case, as I pointed out, Apple doesn't charge the merchants or consumers ANYTHING. They get their .015% from the banks.
 
Apple does many things for free, starting with giving away its operating systems and major software. In this case, as I pointed out, Apple doesn't charge the merchants or consumers ANYTHING. They get their .015% from the banks.
I don’t think Apple gives away the software. I think the cost of the software is included in the price of their products and that’s why their products are so expensive. Up to 30% more than other similar products.
 
I don’t think Apple gives away the software. I think the cost of the software is included in the price of their products and that’s why their products are so expensive. Up to 30% more than other similar products.

No, that's not how it works. That's why you didn't see a price increase when they stopped charging for their OS operating system. They decided to give their OS's for free to add value to their famous ecosystem to the people who were buying their products. And LOL that "similar" products are priced 30% less. That's true only to the extent a Lexus is more expensive than a similar Yugo.
 
hahaha ignorance at its maximum.......Mexican here, and barely ever use cash!
Another mexican here, and I use APPLE PAY!!
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Depends. If it's a country that restricts interchange fees (like the EU), any extra fee that Apple would somehow charge merchants might not be enough to bother explicitly disabling. Not that it's likely that it'd happen at all due to how contactless payment works, of course.
Apple never charges anything directly to merchants, they only charge card issuers. Even if interchange fees are restricted that wouldn’t be a problem, since apple’s cut is a percentage of whatever the card issuers can charge to the merchants whose payment services they provide. And in fact, apple pay did work in the EU from day one, just not with cards issued in the EU but indeed with supported cards from the US and other countries.
 
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I think this is something that's definitely YMMV. Even in CDMX (which seemed to accept cards a lot more compared to e.g. Puerto Vallarta) acceptance of cards wasn't as good as in the US--or at least wasn't made obvious, anyway. Of course, this might have very well changed in the last couple of years.
It’s actually the latter: most places don’t make it obvious that they take cards by not putting up the respective signs, and you often have to verbally ask to find out that they actually do. Since most americans who visit Mexico, especially the white ones, don’t speak a word of spanish, that may indeed be a problem leading them to use cash most of the time when they could be using their cards or even apple pay already. The other problem is the staff training: although there are lots of contactless enabled terminals out there, 99% of the time the staff operating them is only trained to handle chip and magnetic stripe cards. They have no idea how to start a sale without inserting or swiping a card first, and will frequently tell people they don’t take that kind of payment when in reality they could if they were just properly trained. In practice, the result is the same as if the contactless reader wasn’t there at all: contactless payments simply end up not being accepted at most places despite that they do have the technology to accept them.
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Personally, I haven't really seen many places purposely disabling it around here. The usual issue is that some software update broke NFC and they haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.
Yeah software updates do that from time to time. Here in Mexico I saw it happen with the wireless terminals supplied to businesses by BBVA in late 2018/early 2019. A software update intended to put an updated version of the bank’s logo on the terminal screen did turn off the nfc reader on a number of them. The bug was fixed a few weeks later, but at least for me it was annoying while it lasted because it temporarily prevented me from using apple pay at a number of places where I had been using it regularly before the bug hit their terminals.
 
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