151–160 of 229 posts
Too late, I think. Facebook has scared off a lot of the "moms" out there by their bad bad bad privacy history. Do you really want to pay for things using their service?
While I tend to agree, they could throw in an RSA fob or a smartphone-based two-factor equivalent. They probably should already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Credit card companies are big cartels with hefty fees to retailers, slow and unpredictable turnaround between when a payment is made, and when it gets to retailers bank, and infrastructure that's not well suited for micro payments, or peer to peer payments. The consumer doesn't give two flying fucks about any of this. This is a very important point.
I think you're wrong. Ever had to buy stuff you didn't want to meet a minimum spend on cards? Cause over here many shops have a minimum of £5. And this is why. Oh yes, the consumer cares, they just blame the shop owner instead of the cartels.
True story here. Years ago in a retail business we had a $10 minimum for credit card purchases. A customer came in and bought something for like .50c. So the counter person did the charge for $10 and refunded them $9.50 in cash.
However, it can become some kind of market place. It already knows user locality, it already has people flocking to it. It already has big brand stores sharing discounts and coupons to consumers.
All it needs to do is finish the last mile and allow those brands to actually have a "Facebook-only Sale", for example.
Also, it can become a great "local market place", and can help local businesses to sell to local customers.
TLDR: not just ads, and not necessarily a payment gateway, but a niche market place could be it.
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It's not about FB deliberately doing something funky with it - it's about one of the million and one apps that have requested access to your FB account at some point doing something funky with it. You may trust them to do it as securely as the next person, but at least partly based on their past reputation around privacy, I don't.
Do you think facebooks payment implementation would be naive enough to allow anything like this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Credit card companies are big cartels with hefty fees to retailers, slow and unpredictable turnaround between when a payment is made, and when it gets to retailers bank, and infrastructure that's not well suited for micro payments, or peer to peer payments. The consumer doesn't give two flying fucks about any of this. This is a very important point.
I think you're wrong. Ever had to buy stuff you didn't want to meet a minimum spend on cards? Cause over here many shops have a minimum of £5. And this is why. Oh yes, the consumer cares, they just blame the shop owner instead of the cartels.
On the internet? No.
VISA: $3.36 billion profit | DFS: $2.2 billion profit | AXP: $4.9 billion profit | MA: $1.9 billion profit
That's Visa, Discover, American Express, and MasterCard.
That's a $12.4 billion profit, if you take every aspect of all their businesses away from them across the board and basically acquire a complete monopoly in transactions. Their businesses go far beyond processing of course, so you'd really need to not only take over all transaction processing but then double the business.
Facebook processing payments is maybe a billion profit opportunity for them. Not chump change, but very far away from $10 billion.
It would be very convenient for someone, somewhere, to establish a widely accepted micropayment system for the Internet. I sure can just whip out the CC, type in the 16 things, the special code, the expiration date, maybe a second screen the CC vendor presents to get my address or phone number for additional verification... But I would never bother for a 3 or 5 cent article. And I firmly believe that's why there is n…
Micropayments haven't taken off because people don't want to pay 3 to 5 cents for anything. The perception of value is so low that even a one-button form is too much friction in the user experience. If your article is only worth 3 cents, just show it to me for free and put an ad on the page.
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It's frustrating how the Google Toolbar solved this problem perfectly 10 years ago, then stopped working consistently. I should never have to type in a password, credit card number, or address if I don't want to... yet nobody except a few proprietary browser plugin vendors treats this as a problem worth solving.
People are working on it. http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Autocomplete_Types
Any tool that actually solves the problem, at least from my perspective, is going to have to give me the option to ignore whatever security conventions are built into the standard(s).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Credit card companies are big cartels with hefty fees to retailers, slow and unpredictable turnaround between when a payment is made, and when it gets to retailers bank, and infrastructure that's not well suited for micro payments, or peer to peer payments. The consumer doesn't give two flying fucks about any of this. This is a very important point.
I think you're wrong. Ever had to buy stuff you didn't want to meet a minimum spend on cards? Cause over here many shops have a minimum of £5. And this is why. Oh yes, the consumer cares, they just blame the shop owner instead of the cartels.
Many small businesses still do it, of course. What keeps people from reporting them is a mixture of not knowing the regulations and wanting the small business to stay afloat. But regardless, minimum payments actually are put in place by the business.
$10 billion? I don't think so. VISA: $3.36 billion profit | DFS: $2.2 billion profit | AXP: $4.9 billion profit | MA: $1.9 billion profit That's Visa, Discover, American Express, and MasterCard. That's a $12.4 billion profit, if you take every aspect of all their businesses away from them across the board and basically acquire a complete monopoly in transactions. Their businesses go far beyond processing of course, s…