Hey guys!

Visa and Mastercard are the 8th and 15th biggest companies in the world, worth more than 1.1T USD (!!!).

For any purchase made with a credit or debit cards and you give them 2-3% of your money.

That’s one the biggest waste of money from EU you can imagine.

I’m trying to find viable alternatives but except paying cash it seem there is no real alternative. Even in where I live there is an alternate payment service but they take the money from my mastercard, duh…

And the idea would be to have something even my grandma can use, not some nerdy solution, any thoughts?

Edit: Bitcoin would be a solution if widely adopted, but more realistic would be something accepted by every cashier machine, and if possible using the NFC of your phone, a kind of “Apple/Google” Pay, that goes directly from your bank to the bank’s shop. Where I live all debit cards are either visa or mastercard…

Edit2: There is an EU initiative that seem to be starting with WERO, never heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative

Edit3: It seem that Paysafecard and Skrill are EU solutions and sometimes proposed in the payment method, but not with STRIPE payment solutions

        • Victor@lemmy.world
          1·
          16 hours ago

          I’m not so sure Mediamarkt (now renamed to POWER, here) does cash on delivery where I live. I guess our country has largely moved away from cash payments these days.

          • oldfart@lemm.ee
            2·
            15 hours ago

            Probably, since you’ve never heard of this mode of delivery, and it’s almost always among payment choices here. In current times you can also pay with card to the delivery worker.

            Privacy and everything else aside, it’s a good option when you buy from a shady / unknown shop, you risk nothing in case they don’t fulfil the order.

            • Victor@lemmy.world
              1·
              13 hours ago

              you risk nothing in case they don’t fulfil the order.

              Not gonna lie, that does sound pretty darn useful. 👌