11–20 of 53 posts
Not related to the content of the article, but I'm impressed that Bloomberg managed to add another layer of dark patterns to the auto playing scrolling video- there's a full video overlay that you have to click through to unmute the audio before you can actually stop the video from playing.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...
If I were a retailer, I’d be extremely leery of the largest e-tailer asking me to process my payments. My customers know what they are buying from me. And would the payment processor. And if the payment processor can subvert my shop for their online store, then why would my client come back to me? I know customer service, humaning, and all sorts of other anecdotes are supposed to help, but in the end, folks just want…
People aren’t going to magically discover Amazon now if they process payments. Most retail shoppers are well aware they can buy the same items online for cheaper or at least the same price.
What retailers should really fear is a world where people no longer buy things impulsively or at the exact moment of need.
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 communicate back about the status of these disputes in any way, and no discussion is allowed except for one response from the merchant which requires you to send PDFs (mostly automated by Stripe). They don't even tell you if the customer withdraws the dispute and funds still get held for up to 90 days!. And valid reasons range from fraud (on the buyer side) to simply dissatisfaction with a product, all of which becomes the merchant's burden to bear. On top of that, to add insult to injury, the credit card company adds a fee to provide you with this terrible service.
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). The whole process happens within a span of days rather than months. And PayPal manages to do this without charging any more than credit card companies do (via Stripe et al). I've also done disputes through Affirm, a PayPal competitor, and they equally handled them in a fair and easy manner.
This ends up making credit cards super risky for smaller merchants if their transaction volume is low and transaction amounts are high. As someone who runs a small business I highly welcome these alternative payment facilitators, even if they charge the same rates as credit cards, because they do provide a much improved service over the old credit card companies, and that's even with all the convenience features services like Stripe provides.
I do not want to see Amazon analyzing my buying patterns across more vendors.
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…
How does this work if the customer paid Paypal with a credit card and initiated a chargeback? I get the credit card/user could be blacklisted but PayPal would still be out the money even if the seller won the arbitration case.
Not related to the content of the article, but I'm impressed that Bloomberg managed to add another layer of dark patterns to the auto playing scrolling video- there's a full video overlay that you have to click through to unmute the audio before you can actually stop the video from playing.
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…
This would be the last thing I would want to use as a retail store. 1) Customer buys product X from me 2) Payment is processed by Amazon 3) Amazon matches the customer with their own records, sends an advertisement for that same product, at a lower cost 4a) Customer returns product and buys from Amazon 4b) Customer orders from Amazon next time they need it Edit: For the record, Amazon wouldn't even need to be able to…
That said, for any retailer already selling on Amazon the risk is minimal. That is, they are already living with this and (I presume) don't care.