Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

bloomberg.com

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do it. Credit Card companies like MasterCard and AmEx have been selling data to advertisers for at least 8 years now. That plus all the data you can extrapolate from other sources can give anyone an accurate picture of your consumption habits.

Is this in their TOS? Do you know whether one can opt out? Are there any electronic payments schemes that (excluding the e-coins) don't share consumption data?

It seems that you can actually opt-out. Here is the website for MasterCard opt out: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/...

You probably can find similar pages for other companies.

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#32
post #17

One big advantage of PayPal over other payment methods (that's usually lost on consumers) is that they have extremely friendly merchant policies when it comes to fraud or seller protection. With a credit card all it takes is a button press (or phone call) to reverse a charge and it gets with-held for about 90 days at best, and completely reversed with no recourse at worst. According to Stripe, card companies do not c…

> PayPal, and most other "payment facilitators" do a much better job handling disputes. In PayPal's case they provide a much fairer arbitration process (funds are held by PayPal, and a website with message thread is created allowing communication between the merchant, customer, and arbitrator). How does this work if the customer paid Paypal with a credit card and initiated a chargeback? I get the credit card/user cou…

Card companies generally warn customers that they’ll be banned by PayPal if they continue with the chargeback, and encourage them to file a dispute instead.

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#33
post #29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are people who already have Amazon accounts. If the product was cheaper at Amazon they would have made the purchase there from the start. There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return - not to mention you often have to pay return shipping.

>There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return Customer: Wow, I like this $100 blender. Amazon: You could have got it from us for $110 we mean $80. Customer: Damn, I paid too much, I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time.

This exactly. I think a lot of people forget how far a dollar has to go for some people.

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#34
post #29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are people who already have Amazon accounts. If the product was cheaper at Amazon they would have made the purchase there from the start. There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return - not to mention you often have to pay return shipping.

>There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return Customer: Wow, I like this $100 blender. Amazon: You could have got it from us for $110 we mean $80. Customer: Damn, I paid too much, I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time.

> I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time.

Keep in mind, this is already an Amazon customer. They almost certainly already shop Amazon first.

This is a given before you even start.

If you are using this, it's either because you are selling things Amazon doesn't sell (and despite how large they are, there's a ton of stuff like that). Or you have some kind of advantage over Amazon that they can not match.

If all you are doing is matching, or slightly beating Amazon, you already lost before you even implemented Amazon Pay.

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#35

$PYPL hugely down on the news. $SQ took a hit too, weirdly. (I mean at 2:50 PM, after hours is separate with SQ's earnings tonight) Amazon dips its toes in this space all the time. It's hard to tell how serious they are. Amazon Pay has been relaunched at least once. Amazon Register (CC processor which competed with Square) died in 2015: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-do... Amazon Handmade (…

It isn't worth the risk to switch to Amazon. The payments industry right now is cutthroat, with First Data offering clients rates like 1.5 cents per transaction and no basis points over interchange. This is insane compared to what the merchant industry was charging just a few years ago, to the point that many of First Data's own ISOs are being severely undercut on price by the company that provides their own backend.

Why would you choose to be at Amazon's behest, when you can pay less and know you won't need to lift a finger for multiple years wrt credit & debit processing.

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#36
post #34
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return Customer: Wow, I like this $100 blender. Amazon: You could have got it from us for $110 we mean $80. Customer: Damn, I paid too much, I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time.

> I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time. Keep in mind, this is already an Amazon customer. They almost certainly already shop Amazon first. This is a given before you even start. If you are using this, it's either because you are selling things Amazon doesn't sell (and despite how large they are, there's a ton of stuff like that). Or you have some kind of advantage over Amazon that they can not match. If all…

That is terribly kind to Amazon, I'd hold off on presuming every customer, or even a majority of customers always check Amazon first when going to buy items. If that were the case, Amazon would be much much bigger.

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#37
post #32
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PayPal, and most other "payment facilitators" do a much better job handling disputes. In PayPal's case they provide a much fairer arbitration process (funds are held by PayPal, and a website with message thread is created allowing communication between the merchant, customer, and arbitrator). How does this work if the customer paid Paypal with a credit card and initiated a chargeback? I get the credit card/user cou…

Card companies generally warn customers that they’ll be banned by PayPal if they continue with the chargeback, and encourage them to file a dispute instead.

Never encountered this when filing a chargeback on an item or service purchased through PayPal, nor has it negatively affected my PayPal account.

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#38
post #17

One big advantage of PayPal over other payment methods (that's usually lost on consumers) is that they have extremely friendly merchant policies when it comes to fraud or seller protection. With a credit card all it takes is a button press (or phone call) to reverse a charge and it gets with-held for about 90 days at best, and completely reversed with no recourse at worst. According to Stripe, card companies do not c…

> PayPal, and most other "payment facilitators" do a much better job handling disputes. In PayPal's case they provide a much fairer arbitration process (funds are held by PayPal, and a website with message thread is created allowing communication between the merchant, customer, and arbitrator). How does this work if the customer paid Paypal with a credit card and initiated a chargeback? I get the credit card/user cou…

I had this happen once; I tried first with Paypal, who wouldn't pay my money back (I was outside their time-frame), then went to my bank who handled the charge-back. Didn't affect my account.

Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this in their TOS? Do you know whether one can opt out? Are there any electronic payments schemes that (excluding the e-coins) don't share consumption data?

It seems that you can actually opt-out. Here is the website for MasterCard opt out: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/... You probably can find similar pages for other companies.

Their wording is very confusing for me - "To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information to perform data analyses, please provide your Mastercard or Maestro payment card number below."

To me it sounds like, "we are anonymizing your personal info, but you can opt-out and allow us to perform data analytics using your personal info as it is."

Post reply on HN