5 ms·

We Need To Drastically Simplify Payments Online

22 points by nreece 15y ago

objclxt 15y ago
Just to pick up on one point here: the author suggests that his proposal will "enable micropayments", on the basis that "since this payment platform is handled by the credit card companies [...] they can easily charge only a percentage". This is not how interchange fees currently work. Visa/Mastercard/AmEx interchange fees are nearly always a percentage + flat rate: the exact same model as PayPal, et al. So whilst I suppose it is true that card issuers could only charge a percentage, this proposal has no incentive for them to do so.
- dfragnito 15y ago
  PayPal does have micro payment accounts. The micro account fee is 5% + $0.05 instead of 2.9% + $0.30. http://www.paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.html http://www.paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayme...
TamDenholm 15y ago
I honestly think if you managed to get Tony Hsieh to run paypal you'd have an excellent system. Paypal has the market penetration and its actually pretty easy to use, but they treat customers like shit and they're a financial institution and not a bank they aren't subject to the same laws as banks. So take Paypal and add some ethics and customer service and i think you're on to a winner.
- rmc 15y ago
  PayPal operate as a bank in some places. Also PayPal have to fight fraud.
  - drchaos 15y ago
    > PayPal operate as a bank in some places While this is technically true, at least in Europe (PayPal Europe has a Luxemburg bank license), I cannot imagine any regular bank freezing accounts at random, then requiring you to change your password and security question as a condition for unfreezing it. Yet exactly that is what PP did with my account, just today. If thats not the very definition of "treating your customers like shit", then I don't know what is.
regularfry 15y ago
Basically sound, but requiring the platform to deliver the content is silly. For a start it restricts what you can use it for to those products which fit into the "downloadable file" model. I also can't see payment processors wanting to get into the CDN business.
- davej 15y ago
  Why couldn't it be used for physical goods too? There's even an example of Nike shoes on the blog post. Many payment processors are already heavily invested in technology ventures and vice-verse. Amazon is in both the payment processor and CDN business for example.
andyakb 15y ago
to do this, you would need to pray that amazon doesnt sue you for violating their one-click checkout patent, and given that they have their own payment system, i cant imagine it is very likely this would go uncontested. further, if you removed the "one-click" aspect of it, i dont really see how this is any different than paypal on a meaningful level. paypal doesnt treat merchants well, but for customers they are quite good and the process is really simple and takes only a few clicks. i have to think that if it werent for amazon's patent, they would have a one-click checkout button. this seems like the author took an idea that was already implemented and dreamed of ways that it could be better without thinking of feasibility (e.g. assuming that the cc companies would exempt themselves from their fees so that micropayments become feasible)
- SHOwnsYou 15y ago
  Amazon's one-click patent only applies to sites with a shopping cart. So if you only offer a single product or allow purchasing of one thing at a time (but that has obvious drawbacks for physical products), you can still utilize the one-click checkout.
patio11 15y ago
Assume your solution exists and I can sign up for it. How do I answer the following email: "hi I bought bingo maker on my mac at school. I want to use it with my home phone number but it says it is in free trial mode. help!!!" (She means "email address" not phone number, she doesn't know that it is irrelevant how she bought it, and you can safely assume she is incapable of finding the original email she got when she purchases the "bingo maker", which may or may not actually be the product I sell.) Or, more worrisomely: "sucks I can't make birthday cards with this. Give me a refund. - Cindy (bob@example.com)" You really, really want to capture customer details with payments.
- altrego99 15y ago
  The payment platform should have communication and refund supported via the API or their website? So for each buyer, there will be a 'Payment support' button that will be displayed on the Bingo Maker page. When someone uses that, the website owners will see a unique number, and a message. The unique number can be used to check/reverse payments made through the solution, and to respond to the message.
- dmix 15y ago
  > You really, really want to capture customer details with payments. Also Visa/Mastercard dont really give you the option to not capture the address unless you're a big reliable merchant.
  - patio11 15y ago
    Not true - it's trivial for businesses the size of BCC with e.g. Stripe or Paypal Website Payments Pro. A merchant processor may have told you differently, but they, ahem, are not exactly the most trustworthy companies one works with.
- dmethvin 15y ago
  Well the back-end payment processing will have to pass the seller some sort of identifier with the purchase, at the very least something like an email address, so that you can have an account for that person. Then the seller will want to assign a license and/or customer number for their own records. If she doesn't know her email address or license, then yes she is screwed. Just like when I try to return things without a receipt. She can, of course, dispute payments with the credit card processor or whoever paid the seller. Even when a merchant provides clear paths to get refunds on their site, some people just prefer to do a chargeback which costs the seller a lot more than the purchase price.
Intermediate 15y ago
Bitcoins already are simply enough
- bendauphinee 15y ago
  And bitcoins are not a solution for my parents. This is an interesting idea, and bitcoin has nothing to do with it.
moe 15y ago
Say what! Everyone knows this. It's the no-brainer of our generation. On the developer-side, everyone who has had the misfortune to integrate a payment provider [other then stripe] knows that the current ecosystem is not just ripe for disruption. It is begging on its knees to be extinguished. The holdback is not the lack of fancy photoshop mockups. The holdback is the astronomic barrier of entry. Stripe managed to partially fix the system for one country. And I've been told it took them many years to get a foot down. There's still a lifetime opportunity here, sitting on a golden plate. A lifetime opportunity of Tolkien proportions, mind you. The reward will be substantial for the fearless who can slay this Dragon. He who prevails will not only get the gold and the princess. He will also take the payment-crown to his lineage for many generations to come. But beware. Countless perils, from raging paperwork to ravenous lawyers line the path of whoever dares to embark on this journey. So. Better bring a couple dwarfs and a mage. Perhaps the cuddly mage of the sandal could be convinced to cast his mighty "umm" and open a portal for you.
steve8918 15y ago
There's a couple of reasons why this article is interesting, but relatively naive. It won't work because companies WANT your information, in order to extend their marketing capabilities to you. Also, it turns Mastercard/VISA into a consumer-facing business, which is it not currently. And I'm pretty sure they're happy only dealing with merchants. There was a good article a couple of years ago on why Google Payments was having such a hard time competing against Paypal, and the reason was customer service. Paypal spent more on customer service than Google did (at the time, not sure about now) and this allowed the overall customer service to be better. When you have regular people in the mix, it makes business much, much harder, and I'm pretty sure the credit card companies don't want to deal with that BS. So they're perfectly fine letting others deal with customers directly. If they shifted to the system that the author described, all of the load would be on Mastercard/VISA, including things like refunds, etc, and that's not exactly a high-margin business. So, it's a nice thought, but having a single point of service/privacy/failure likely won't happen with the status quo, unless a completely new merchant shows up willing to take on everything associated with payments.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  Um, Mastercard already do payment processing. They're just really crap at it. Dominos use them here in the UK for example. I only noticed because it broke last night. But to call him naive when you're obviously not too clued in either... Pot, Kettle. https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/Payments https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/Payments And it looks like Visa are getting in on the action too, now there's a big surprise, it's in Beta: https://developer.visa.com/#vme https://developer.visa.com/#vme
streptomycin 15y ago
How is this substantially different than Paypal?
debacle 15y ago
I read up until the point where the author compared online payments to the Facebook like button.
- pbreit 15y ago
  Why is that? It's a pretty good comparison, especially for low price digital items.
stickfigure 15y ago
This already exists. Minus the iframe, the blog author is describing Paypal. With the iframe, it's WePay. The real-world problems are: * Users don't want to have to create a WePay/Paypal/Mastercard/whatever account. Having Mastercard run the infrastructure doesn't solve the problem - what about the people with Visa or Amex cards? The fact is, people today have CC#s and they expect to pay with those #s. Yeah, typing in your password is smoother, but there's a giant chunk of your audience that HATES <insert payment system here> and will refuse to use it. Can you afford to ignore them? No, you cannot. This is why PayPal/WePay/etc all give the option of checkout-without-login. * Anonymous transactions don't work online. They don't even work in the case the author is using to illustrate - downloading a tv show. What if the download gets cut off halfway through? What if my hard disk crashes after downloading? Users expect to be able to get their content back. This means the purchase needs to be associated with some sort of account on the vendor's system - usually an email address. And patio11 already mentioned refunds. You can't compare the online experience with the offline experience - offline, the customer is happy when they exit the store with the physical item. There is no online equivalent. * Vendors want some identifying information from customers. Fear of giving out an email address is not what prevents people from making online purchases. So vendors are going to demand it and they are going to get it. Anonymous transactions are a problem nobody needs to solve - except for businesses that Mastercard and friends aren't going to touch anyways. * The hypothesis about micro-payments is incredibly naive. "But since this payment platform is handled by the credit card companies themselves, they can easily charge only a percentage, and still make just as much money." It's the credit card companies that charge these prices today! This is like saying "if Mafia bosses directly extorted local businesses instead of brokering the rights to underlings, they could charge less by cutting out the middleman!" * The fraud "solution" (delay payments for two weeks!) are exactly what get people pissed off at Paypal. Yeah, it's a solution. It doesn't make people happy. I have no doubt that the paypal/wepay/dwolla/etc kind of payment model will eventually dominate over "type in your credit card # and 207 other characters of information), but this is not new. It already exists. The problem is that customers are incredibly slow to adopt new payment methods.
pbreit 15y ago
PayPal is pretty similar but PayPal's checkout flow is still horrifying.
daniper 15y ago
Have any of you tried Dashlane? https://www.dashlane.com https://www.dashlane.com Dashlane offers universal click-to-pay functionality, doesn't require any custom build or partnership with retailers, and securely stores your payment info so that only you can access it. Just went public last week.

22 points by nreece 15y ago

Just to pick up on one point here: the author suggests that his proposal will "enable micropayments", on the basis that "since this payment platform is handled by the credit card companies [...] they can easily charge only a percentage". This is not how interchange fees currently work. Visa/Mastercard/AmEx interchange fees are nearly always a percentage + flat rate: the exact same model as PayPal, et al. So whilst I suppose it is true that card issuers could only charge a percentage, this proposal has no incentive for them to do so.

dfragnito 15y ago
PayPal does have micro payment accounts. The micro account fee is 5% + $0.05 instead of 2.9% + $0.30. http://www.paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.html http://www.paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayme...

TamDenholm 15y ago

I honestly think if you managed to get Tony Hsieh to run paypal you'd have an excellent system. Paypal has the market penetration and its actually pretty easy to use, but they treat customers like shit and they're a financial institution and not a bank they aren't subject to the same laws as banks. So take Paypal and add some ethics and customer service and i think you're on to a winner.

rmc 15y ago
PayPal operate as a bank in some places. Also PayPal have to fight fraud.
- drchaos 15y ago
  > PayPal operate as a bank in some places While this is technically true, at least in Europe (PayPal Europe has a Luxemburg bank license), I cannot imagine any regular bank freezing accounts at random, then requiring you to change your password and security question as a condition for unfreezing it. Yet exactly that is what PP did with my account, just today. If thats not the very definition of "treating your customers like shit", then I don't know what is.

regularfry 15y ago

Basically sound, but requiring the platform to deliver the content is silly. For a start it restricts what you can use it for to those products which fit into the "downloadable file" model. I also can't see payment processors wanting to get into the CDN business.

davej 15y ago
Why couldn't it be used for physical goods too? There's even an example of Nike shoes on the blog post. Many payment processors are already heavily invested in technology ventures and vice-verse. Amazon is in both the payment processor and CDN business for example.

andyakb 15y ago

to do this, you would need to pray that amazon doesnt sue you for violating their one-click checkout patent, and given that they have their own payment system, i cant imagine it is very likely this would go uncontested. further, if you removed the "one-click" aspect of it, i dont really see how this is any different than paypal on a meaningful level. paypal doesnt treat merchants well, but for customers they are quite good and the process is really simple and takes only a few clicks. i have to think that if it werent for amazon's patent, they would have a one-click checkout button. this seems like the author took an idea that was already implemented and dreamed of ways that it could be better without thinking of feasibility (e.g. assuming that the cc companies would exempt themselves from their fees so that micropayments become feasible)

SHOwnsYou 15y ago
Amazon's one-click patent only applies to sites with a shopping cart. So if you only offer a single product or allow purchasing of one thing at a time (but that has obvious drawbacks for physical products), you can still utilize the one-click checkout.

patio11 15y ago

Assume your solution exists and I can sign up for it. How do I answer the following email: "hi I bought bingo maker on my mac at school. I want to use it with my home phone number but it says it is in free trial mode. help!!!" (She means "email address" not phone number, she doesn't know that it is irrelevant how she bought it, and you can safely assume she is incapable of finding the original email she got when she purchases the "bingo maker", which may or may not actually be the product I sell.) Or, more worrisomely: "sucks I can't make birthday cards with this. Give me a refund. - Cindy (bob@example.com)" You really, really want to capture customer details with payments.

altrego99 15y ago
The payment platform should have communication and refund supported via the API or their website? So for each buyer, there will be a 'Payment support' button that will be displayed on the Bingo Maker page. When someone uses that, the website owners will see a unique number, and a message. The unique number can be used to check/reverse payments made through the solution, and to respond to the message.
dmix 15y ago
> You really, really want to capture customer details with payments. Also Visa/Mastercard dont really give you the option to not capture the address unless you're a big reliable merchant.
- patio11 15y ago
  Not true - it's trivial for businesses the size of BCC with e.g. Stripe or Paypal Website Payments Pro. A merchant processor may have told you differently, but they, ahem, are not exactly the most trustworthy companies one works with.
dmethvin 15y ago
Well the back-end payment processing will have to pass the seller some sort of identifier with the purchase, at the very least something like an email address, so that you can have an account for that person. Then the seller will want to assign a license and/or customer number for their own records. If she doesn't know her email address or license, then yes she is screwed. Just like when I try to return things without a receipt. She can, of course, dispute payments with the credit card processor or whoever paid the seller. Even when a merchant provides clear paths to get refunds on their site, some people just prefer to do a chargeback which costs the seller a lot more than the purchase price.

Intermediate 15y ago

Bitcoins already are simply enough

bendauphinee 15y ago
And bitcoins are not a solution for my parents. This is an interesting idea, and bitcoin has nothing to do with it.

moe 15y ago

Say what! Everyone knows this. It's the no-brainer of our generation. On the developer-side, everyone who has had the misfortune to integrate a payment provider [other then stripe] knows that the current ecosystem is not just ripe for disruption. It is begging on its knees to be extinguished. The holdback is not the lack of fancy photoshop mockups. The holdback is the astronomic barrier of entry. Stripe managed to partially fix the system for one country. And I've been told it took them many years to get a foot down. There's still a lifetime opportunity here, sitting on a golden plate. A lifetime opportunity of Tolkien proportions, mind you. The reward will be substantial for the fearless who can slay this Dragon. He who prevails will not only get the gold and the princess. He will also take the payment-crown to his lineage for many generations to come. But beware. Countless perils, from raging paperwork to ravenous lawyers line the path of whoever dares to embark on this journey. So. Better bring a couple dwarfs and a mage. Perhaps the cuddly mage of the sandal could be convinced to cast his mighty "umm" and open a portal for you.

steve8918 15y ago

There's a couple of reasons why this article is interesting, but relatively naive. It won't work because companies WANT your information, in order to extend their marketing capabilities to you. Also, it turns Mastercard/VISA into a consumer-facing business, which is it not currently. And I'm pretty sure they're happy only dealing with merchants. There was a good article a couple of years ago on why Google Payments was having such a hard time competing against Paypal, and the reason was customer service. Paypal spent more on customer service than Google did (at the time, not sure about now) and this allowed the overall customer service to be better. When you have regular people in the mix, it makes business much, much harder, and I'm pretty sure the credit card companies don't want to deal with that BS. So they're perfectly fine letting others deal with customers directly. If they shifted to the system that the author described, all of the load would be on Mastercard/VISA, including things like refunds, etc, and that's not exactly a high-margin business. So, it's a nice thought, but having a single point of service/privacy/failure likely won't happen with the status quo, unless a completely new merchant shows up willing to take on everything associated with payments.

mattmanser 15y ago
Um, Mastercard already do payment processing. They're just really crap at it. Dominos use them here in the UK for example. I only noticed because it broke last night. But to call him naive when you're obviously not too clued in either... Pot, Kettle. https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/Payments https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/Payments And it looks like Visa are getting in on the action too, now there's a big surprise, it's in Beta: https://developer.visa.com/#vme https://developer.visa.com/#vme

streptomycin 15y ago

How is this substantially different than Paypal?

debacle 15y ago

I read up until the point where the author compared online payments to the Facebook like button.

pbreit 15y ago
Why is that? It's a pretty good comparison, especially for low price digital items.

stickfigure 15y ago

This already exists. Minus the iframe, the blog author is describing Paypal. With the iframe, it's WePay. The real-world problems are: * Users don't want to have to create a WePay/Paypal/Mastercard/whatever account. Having Mastercard run the infrastructure doesn't solve the problem - what about the people with Visa or Amex cards? The fact is, people today have CC#s and they expect to pay with those #s. Yeah, typing in your password is smoother, but there's a giant chunk of your audience that HATES <insert payment system here> and will refuse to use it. Can you afford to ignore them? No, you cannot. This is why PayPal/WePay/etc all give the option of checkout-without-login. * Anonymous transactions don't work online. They don't even work in the case the author is using to illustrate - downloading a tv show. What if the download gets cut off halfway through? What if my hard disk crashes after downloading? Users expect to be able to get their content back. This means the purchase needs to be associated with some sort of account on the vendor's system - usually an email address. And patio11 already mentioned refunds. You can't compare the online experience with the offline experience - offline, the customer is happy when they exit the store with the physical item. There is no online equivalent. * Vendors want some identifying information from customers. Fear of giving out an email address is not what prevents people from making online purchases. So vendors are going to demand it and they are going to get it. Anonymous transactions are a problem nobody needs to solve - except for businesses that Mastercard and friends aren't going to touch anyways. * The hypothesis about micro-payments is incredibly naive. "But since this payment platform is handled by the credit card companies themselves, they can easily charge only a percentage, and still make just as much money." It's the credit card companies that charge these prices today! This is like saying "if Mafia bosses directly extorted local businesses instead of brokering the rights to underlings, they could charge less by cutting out the middleman!" * The fraud "solution" (delay payments for two weeks!) are exactly what get people pissed off at Paypal. Yeah, it's a solution. It doesn't make people happy. I have no doubt that the paypal/wepay/dwolla/etc kind of payment model will eventually dominate over "type in your credit card # and 207 other characters of information), but this is not new. It already exists. The problem is that customers are incredibly slow to adopt new payment methods.

pbreit 15y ago

PayPal is pretty similar but PayPal's checkout flow is still horrifying.

daniper 15y ago

Have any of you tried Dashlane? https://www.dashlane.com https://www.dashlane.com Dashlane offers universal click-to-pay functionality, doesn't require any custom build or partnership with retailers, and securely stores your payment info so that only you can access it. Just went public last week.