ferrari_fan

Awesome read. Thank you for sharing. ^

nocloud

Does anybody know what the foreign exchange fees are for this card?

mia

1.1%

Dr_wanderlust

I've never had a problem using my JCB card (I've had it almost 10 years) in the US or elsewhere as long as the merchant took JCB or Discover.

It can cause a stir using it in Japan when you are obviously not Japanese but for me this has only happened a couple times and, relatively speaking, hinterlands (e.g., Beppu).

patchmonkey

I used to use mine all the time when I was working closer to Mitsuwa (actually, I may still have an open JCB account, I guess I should find my card). It made great sense because certain days I received up to 10% cash back on my purchases there.

Interestingly, when in Japan, I never was charged foreign exchange fees for the US-issued card.

kebosabi

It could be that JCB puts the 1.1% foreign transaction fee into the conversion rate. They were never a defendant to the CCF class action lawsuit to disclose foreign transaction fees separately since those lawsuits involved only VISA, MC, and AMEX.

Scifience

This reminds me of my "magic" UnionPay card, where ~50% of transactions made in the US never post (even over a year later). I never feel particularly bad about it, as the merchant has every opportunity to reject my card if they can't process it properly. If it swipes and I sign the receipt, complete with authorisation code, and I ultimately pay when/if it is processed, I've met my end of the bargain.

I've also had similar experiences with a JCB (Japan-issued) card in the US.

Given that I've never heard about it from merchants, even when they have ways to contact me or I'm a repeat customer, I almost wonder if they are getting paid, and it's actually their acquirer that isn't handling it properly.

jamar

On the topic of UnionPay, though, mine (single-network card) has been outright rejected at a lot of merchants that I would normally expect to take it. Except for Costco- it worked fine there.

Also, my China-issued dual UnionPay+JCB card (got one in China because my American state of residence isn't one of the ones that JCB USA issues cards to) didn't work at half the places I went to. But then again, that may be a product of the dual-network oddity- UnionPay has an agreement with Discover, so does JCB, so which way does Discover send the transaction? (I wish I was given a choice, but I'm guessing this is a fairly rare situation- in my case, Starbucks purchases showed up as run through JCB while a couple others showed up as UnionPay with no obvious rule as to which goes where)

kebosabi

I thought Costco only accepted AMEX?

skynerd

I have been trying my new Marukai Premium JCB card and figure it might be useful to others for me to list my experiences so far on who seems to accept JCB and who seems not to. I plan to edit updates into this post in the future to avoid cluttering the thread.

I have yet to successfully use the JCB card online (although I have not yet tried Amazon), but brick-and-mortar merchant seem to accept JCB for card present transactions perhaps as often as they accept American Express. This also seems true of local business, which I think are not relevant to enough readers to warrant my listing them.

ACCEPTED:
Arbys, Barnes and Noble (in store), Boston Market, Dollar Tree, McDonalds, Ruby Thai, Safeway (self checkout and regular cashier checkout, but not the gas pump), Toys R Us, Walmart, Wendys

REJECTED:
American Express gift cards, American Express Serve, Paypal (at least when logged in), PayUSATax, Safeway gas, Sbarro (does not accept Discover), ValueTaxPayment, WilliamPaid, Yoshinoya (even though they claim to accept Discover)

trumpet205

@skynerd

JCB-Discover alliance is strictly for card present transaction only. It will NOT work for online and telephone transaction. This is confirmed by one of the Discover representative I talked to.

kebosabi

My interest is whether the JCB USA cards are accepted online to buy airline tickets as that would be the biggest expense to earn 3% cash back. Would try it out with mom's card if I could, but she only uses her Marukai JCB card to shop at Marukai.

For example, AA.com claims JCB cards are accepted


Also a lot of self service gas pumps carry the JCB logo along with the usual credit cards and I've seen that even in the outskirts of Montana. Never know if it would actually work though.

jamar

Credit, yes. Debit, no. And UnionPay counts as "debit" at Costco (run through the Pulse ATM/debit network), so it works. Even my UnionPay-only credit card. It just has to have a PIN.

Dr_wanderlust

I've used my JCB card to buy online from several airlines and probably 50 different retailers. But you can do better than 3% on airlines with Penfed and US Bank.

wolfman888

This is what I am thinking too. Why are so many people excited about 3% cash back? My Credit Saison UA Mileage Plus Visa gives me better value than that if I crunch the numbers. 4.5 - 8.0% depending on whether I do an economy or business class award.