I recently purchased a jacket online on the Swiss country section of a renowned brand and paid in CHF using my Viseca credit card.

To my surprise, Viseca has charged me CHF 24.25 processing fee for this transaction. To make things worse, I was charged the same amount twice again because I had to sent back the jacket, get a refund, and order a larger size (the company does not offer exchanges).

As per Viseca, even though the transaction has not been in a foreign currency, I have to cough up the fees as the brand is a foreign acceptance point and it is my responsibility to find out whether the vendor is based abroad.

All in all, this jacket has costed me nearly CHF 75 in processing fees, which I find borderline criminal.

Why are you upset with Viseca? It is indeed your responability to find out whether they are based abroad. I would be upset with the "renowned" brand because, even though they have a Swiss section, they do not inform you you might be charged. Or they have info in the payment section which you need to check yourself. I am sure it is frustrating to pay even twice but I do not think it has to do with viseca. They did inform you about the 1.75% fee right?

I´d be annoyed as well. It happened to me with Swiss (the airline) when I bought something on board as their processing center is in Dublin or so....

Yeah, I'm sure we all look out for this when we pay whatever we purchase online in CHF...

I am sure we do not but you should be mad at the brand...not viseca...they burned you...twice
But if in the payment section they do have info...no chance

Get a Revolut card, problem solved

I always assume that the “Swiss section” of a website just means they are willing to ship to Switzerland, nothing more. If it turns out they are properly set up that is just bonus.

And OP, it would be impossible for your card company to try and supervise your purchases to make sure you did not make such mistakes. That is your responsibility.

Not twice, but 3x CHF 24.25 (original purchase, refund, purchase of larger size jacket).

I will reach out to Viseca to see what they can do about this. If not, then I'll most likely explore better alternatives (if any) that are not pre-paid (i.e. Revolut) and cancel Viseca. I still have a EUR credit card from back home for which I do not get charged outrageous fees, not even when I use it to pay in a different currency.

Apparently, these fees were introduced to stop people from topping up their Revolut card using a bank's credit card.

Get the new Migros Credit Card - it's free and there is no foreign exchange processing fees.

Credit card companies have been doing what you describe for a while now and it's likely in th GTC.

Yeah, actually just been going through the details and it's looks promising (albeit also from Viseca)!

Sort of from Viseca...I have it too and they have a separate support for the Cumulus...I think it is actually from Migros Bank.
I suddenly have more cumulus points

its really good - also the website etc. I have had it for 4 months and am a happy customer so far (but no issues to deal with thus far)

This is worth looking at too:

https://www.yuh.com/en/

My experience with Viseca is that they refund the foreign transaction fee when a transaction is reversed/ reimbursed. So I’d expect you need to pay just 1x the fee, for the jacket you kept.

Simply get in touch with them, or worst case, dispute the monthly statement when it arrives, you’ll have 30 days or so.