Thanks to government initiatives, cashless payments have become indispensable in the modern restaurant industry, but at the same time, many restaurant managers face a major challenge: the burden of fees. This challenge has been pointed out since cashless payments were first introduced.
Although it varies depending on the service, payment service providers generally charge about 3% of the transaction amount as a fee. In other words, the store's sales go to the card company first, and the fee is deducted before the payment is made, so the higher the monthly sales, the higher the absolute amount of the fee.
For example, if a store has monthly sales of 5 million yen, the fee will be 150,000 yen, or 1.8 million yen per year. For restaurants with low profit margins, this fee will definitely be a burden.
Some analysts point out that as the price of goods increases due to the recent weak yen, the proportion of credit card customers will increase, which will put pressure on profits, and this is probably true in reality.
In the case of PayPay, which did not charge fees when it was first introduced, it now charges nearly 2%. Some restaurants, wanting to be free from the curse of these fees, have apparently stopped using cashless payment services that they had initially introduced.
Why is this happening? One reason has long been pointed out as the fact that fees in Japan are higher than those in Europe, the US, and Australia. It has also been pointed out that there is an opaque aspect to the fact that payment fees vary depending on the industry, business type, and size of the business. These points are certainly key to the fee issue.
However, before we look at these points, we need to understand why cashless payment fees are charged in the first place in order to solve the problem.
