So what’s the right number? 0%? Any number would elicit moaning from the peanut gallery. Look at retail store gross margins on the products they sell (I.e. their cut of the retail price), and the terms they set for their wholesalers.
The right number is decided by competition. Different payment processors vie for customers by offering better deals until profit margins stabilize at a reasonable level. That's impossible with a monopoly.
Thank you for this. People seem to get bogged down in what percentage is right or wrong (something that reasonable people can very reasonably disagree about), but ultimately the problem is that there's no competitive marketplace.
Apple Store isn't a Point of Sale system you outsource to IBM.
It's inventory, delivery, and to an extent stewardship. The same with Steam. I don't expect junk and I expect refunds when I find it. Once you split that to a vendor the perverse incentives kick in and you end up right back in the Bad Place.
I personally think somewhere in the neighborhood of 18% is probably closer to sustainable, given all that we expect. And I also think Apple fucked up. If they had voluntarily reduced their fees and created the intro level at the same time, and a year or so earlier, they could have picked a higher number than they are likely now to end up with when all is said and done.
Did you just compare the markup of a retailer after negotiation with their supplier to the fee of a monopolist of the means of distribution on someone else's offered price? Because it seems to me those are very different things.
