You're right on that one. The merchant agreements all forbid adding on fees for use of credit and debit cards. They also forbid minimum charge but I see minimum $5 or $10 in mom and pop stores all the time.
That's probably because the fees for each transaction they're paying is probably around 20 cents per transaction plus 1 or 2 percent of the total.
So a charge for $1.00 would mean the fee would amount to 21 cents! Imagine!
It's the same amount here with National Grid. You can side step it by doing ACH. But that has its own problems.
The thing is most utilities were just plain stupid about PCI so they farmed it out to Western Union, which will ALWAYS extract its pound of flesh.
They could just use the Google Checkout API and be done with it.
I used my ARCO MC Debit Card for just about everything, mostly for payng my bills online, just this week ARCO switched from MC to Discover, now for some reason I'm unable to use it to pay bills, they say it is blocked, but no whare on the agreement does it say you can't use it to pay bills online or over the phone, the other thing is you would get between 1 to 4% over time, now it is .25% a quarter. According to everyone I talked to there is no reason to not allow such use as it is just a debit transaction to the system, I guess I just will not use it at all. I don't use Credit Cards at all.
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