Amazon Told Us to Stop Using Visa Credit Cards for Months, Then Changed Its Mind
After telling UK customers for months that it would no longer accept Visa credit cards, Amazon decided yesterday to reverse course.
Back in November, Amazon sent out an email to its customers in the UK stating "the high fees Visa charges for processing credit card transactions" meant it could no longer accept them as a form of payment. What followed was a warning every time you tried to pay with a Visa card on Amazon UK that an alternative was required soon.
Yesterday, that changed and UK customers received the following email from Amazon:
"The expected change regarding the use of Visa credit cards on Amazon.co.uk will no longer take place on January 19. We are working closely with Visa on a potential solution that will enable customers to continue using their Visa credit cards on Amazon.co.uk.
Should we make any changes related to Visa credit cards, we will give you advance notice. Until then, you can continue to use Visa credit cards, debit cards, Mastercard, American Express, and Eurocard as you do today.
Thank you for being an Amazon customer."
As someone who lives in the UK, I've seen first-hand how this behavior by Amazon has caused a lot of frustration and anger. People took time over the holiday period to switch from Visa to an alternative card so as to ensure they could continue to access Amazon's services. For some, this also meant changing the cards of elderly relatives who had become more reliant on Amazon for deliveries and entertainment, as fears of catching COVID-19 kept them at home.
Ultimately, this whole debacle looks like Amazon used its customer base as a bargaining chip in order to put pressure on Visa to lower its processing fees. That tactic seems to have worked, but at what cost to Amazon's
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