It marks the end of a payment dispute that started brewing last year.
According to Reuters, Amazon and Visa have settled their long-running dispute over payment fees in the UK and elsewhere. “We recently reached a global agreement with Visa that allows all customers to use their Visa credit cards in our stores,” a Reuters spokesperson said.
Amazon has threatened to stop accepting Visa in the United Kingdom as of January 19th, citing high credit card transaction fees. The rest of Europe was unaffected because the EU has a fee cap on card issuers, but following Brexit, both Mastercard and Visa card issuers increased fees in the UK. Regulators in the United Kingdom recently announced that they would look into the increases.
It seemed likely that Amazon wouldn’t carry out its threat, given Visa’s dominance in the payment market. Sure enough, shortly before that deadline, Amazon announced it would continue accepting the cards after all and said it was “closely working with Visa on a potential solution.”
Amazon didn’t ban or threaten to ban Visa cards anywhere else, but it has been charging an additional transaction fee for Visa-using customers in Australia and Singapore. That charge has now been revoked, and Visa and Amazon appear to have put the whole thing behind them. “This agreement includes the acceptance of Visa at all Amazon stores and sites today, as well as a joint commitment to collaboration on new product and technology initiatives,” a Visa spokesperson said in a statement.
