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> if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning. In Germany, every business (and some individuals) has published their acco
by FabHK 2y ago
> if receiving payments would’ve been as easy as receiving email from the beginning.
In Germany, every business (and some individuals) has published their account number for ages (on the letterhead, website, etc.), typically right next to their address and email address (or fax number, for that matter).
And with that account number, you can just transfer money to the recipient. It really is as easy as email.
- Lionga 2y agoIt really is not, and I would assume less 1% of consumer purchases are done using a bank tranfer / account number.
- FabHK 2y agoIn Germany (2021), online purchases were paid by: 33% Bill & bank transfer 20% Direct debit 20% PayPal 11% Credit card 16% various others https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/banken-versicherungen/banken/online-bezahlen-das-sind-die-vor-und-nachteile-von-sofortueberweisungen/26293754.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/banken-versicherungen/...
- mcntsh 2y agoImagine you are an sized e-commerce merchant. Someone checks out on your website and sends you a bank transfer. Then what? You go through your ledger (bank account), find the transaction with an order ID as a memo (hopefully the buyer added it and correctly), and then you look up that order in your system and submit the order form to your warehouse?
- bgnn 2y agoIt works like: customer gets an order number and puts this on the description of the bank transfer. This is parsed by the accounting SW coupled to this bank account, and voila! Most banks charge some amount per transaction on commercial accounts though.
- mcntsh 2y agoThe problem is that it's extremely failure prone and not instant. Gotta wait for the buyer to make the transfer, you gotta wait for the transfer to go through, you gotta hope that the buyer put in the order number in the description.
- leobg 2y agoWell, it really doesn’t suit itself for automation, much less for real-time transactions. Say, you want to sell access to an article on your website. It would be cumbersome for the customer to have to switch over to their online banking and typing in all details (ok, today we have QR codes, but you still need to jump through many hoops, much more than with, say, a credit card or PayPal payment). Then it takes time until the money shows up in your account - sometimes several days. And, finally, there was no API access available from the banks for small sellers that would have allowed them to build an integration, even if they had the resources to write custom software.