Do your festive shopping around Amazon Prime Day 2020 or Black Friday, retailers warn
The industry body for online retailers has encouraged shoppers to do their Christmas shopping early during Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day 2020.
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Amazon might also ditch Visa credit cards in the US
After announcing that it would stop accepting Visa-issued credit cards in the UK, Amazon is now considering ending its partnership with the company on its co-branded credit card in the US.
According to a new report from Reuters, the ecommerce giant is currently in talks with Visa, Mastercard and American Express to review its co-branded credit card agreements.Â
If you shop on Amazon's ecommerce platform frequently, you've likely seen promotions for its Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card at checkout with the offer of a $200 Amazon Gift Card upon approval. In addition to its co-branded card with Visa, the company also has a partnership with American Express for its Amazon Business Prime American Express Card which offers a $125 Amazon Gift Card upon approval instead.
An Amazon spokesperson described these talks with the three big credit card companies to Reuters as part of its standard process for reviewing its co-branded credit card agreements.Â
Rising credit card surcharges
Credit card processing fees typically range between 1.5 to 3.5 percent of each transaction and these surcharges can make it difficult for Amazon and other online retailers as well as small businesses to offer their goods and services at a cheaper price to consumers.
In response to increasingly high fees from Visa, Amazon recently introduced surcharges on customers using Visa credit cards in both Singapore and Australia. Meanwhile in the UK, Visa began charging 1.5 percent of the transaction value for credit card payments made online or over the phone between the UK and EU. This is because an EU-enforced cap on fees charged by credit card issuers is no longer in place in the UK following Brexit.
While retailers have previously had to deal with processing charges from credit card firms to gain access to their huge networks of users, this could be changing as shown by Amazon's current negotiations with Visa, American Express and Mastercard. Although the ecommerce giant could be planning to launch its own payments system, it also might be using the massive size of its customer base to get a better deal from credit card companies when it comes to transaction fees.
We'll have to wait and see how negotiations between Amazon and Visa play out but for the time being, you'll still be able to use your Visa credit card when shopping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals on its platform.
We've also featured the best payment gateways, best credit card processing services and best ecommerce hostingÂ
Via Reuters
Date
18 Nov 2021Sources
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A new Arm-based CPU with 128 cores will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD
Read MoreChinese bare metal and server hosting company Alibaba Cloud is preparing to trial a new instance type powered by custom Arm-based silicon.
The new Yitian 710 server processor, first unveiled in October, will underpin Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances powered by a varying number of vCPUs, each of which will be tied to a physical core.
Under the preview program, which will last only two months and support just 100 customers, a single configuration will be available, with 4 vCPUs, 16GB memory and 3Gbit/sec network bandwidth.
Alibaba Cloud enters the ARM race
Alibaba’s Yitian 710 CPU is built on TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing process and boasts a staggering 128 cores and 60 billion transistors per die.
Based on Arm’s v9 architecture, the processor reaches speeds of up to 3.2GHz and supports up to eight DDR5 memory channels and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes.
The developments at Alibaba Cloud will be monitored closely at Intel and AMD, neither of which will be pleased to see another cloud provider following in the footsteps of AWS with its own custom silicon.
According to Alibaba, its new Yitian-powered instances offer a “cost-effectiveness ratio” that’s twice as great as its previous-generation instances powered by chips from the US giants, although it’s not quite clear how this ratio is calculated.
Read moreThe arrival of Yitian-powered instances also highlights the advance of Arm-based CPUs into the server market, which has typically been dominated by Intel’s x86 architecture.
In conversation with TechRadar Pro at MWC 2022, Arm’s SVP of Infrastructure said the company expects to make significant headway in the server market in the coming years as its investments begin to bear fruit.
“Arm first talked about getting into servers 15 years ago and we’re only now beginning to see this vision come to fruition. In this industry, the investments are big and it takes time for these things to come through,” he said.
“But we’ve now started to come up with some very interesting attributes that set us apart. Arm-based solutions tend to have many more cores, which has allowed us to address the scale-out workloads on which a lot of cloud is built.”
Whether cloud providers choose to design their own Arm-based processors, à la AWS and Alibaba, or to purchase from a vendor like Ampere Computing doesn’t matter much to Arm. It’s about demonstrating Arm-based CPUs are capable of delivering the necessary performance for the broad range of workloads that have shifted to the cloud.
Via The Register
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Docker could be set to delete all your files if you haven't accessed them for a while
Docker is freeing up space by deleting 4.5PB of inactive container images.
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