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Send money with Gmail

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Re: Send money with Gmail

#221
post #90

I think this is going to be really big. But it might require actual customer service; that must have made them think twice.

Many years ago, Google made statements like "we only do things that scale, and customer support doesn't scale". It was a strong guiding philosophy for many of the engineers, but that philosophy has eroded. If we look at some of Google's biggest successes, it has been things that don't scale: - The Ground Truth team in India, manually drawing the world's maps. - Manual spam detection in search results - Customer Suppo…

Anything of real value doesn't scale. Just look at Google Maps a lot of companies tried to make their own Map apps and failed. Why? Because google invested a ton of money into doing things that computers can't a present and require manual work this can't be replaced by any other map app without doing the same thing.

There's real value in recognizing what computers can't do and investing into doing it anyway and it can make your app irreplaceable.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#222
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue issue is here; > securely send money to friends and family _in the U.S._ Google Voice it's the same problem - most of the world can't use it. Instead of 80/20 this is 20/80

That's just the first step, testing to a smaller set of users. If it works well, they will expand it to the rest of the world for sure.

They generally don't. Many Google services have regional restrictions and had them for years. I think they want to do these legally risky stuff within their comfort zone.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#223
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... it's US-only, again? It won't be long before I just proxy all of my traffic through Amazon s3 or something.

Tell us more how you can proxy through s3

Oh my bad, I meant EC2. I never used AWS since they require a credit card even for the free things.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#224
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the country-specific regulatory red tape that comes with anything involving money, there's more of an excuse than normal to roll this out country-by-country.

Google Wallet is how old now, three+ years? They didn't even bother adding any other way to pay than credit cards. Someone needs to tell them that there are countries where people simply don't use credit cards. They exist, but at cost, and the culture just isn't there. If they continue innovating in the payment space at this rate, they will maybe have a solution people here can actually use in 2020.

Talking about credit cards, what's the difference between a credit card and just a bank account?

At my bank you can get a credit card at an added cost, but it's not needed for anything in the Netherlands so I never looked into it.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#225
post #26
post #4

How is this going to be handled, as a money exchange system ("yo, here's for covering lunch for me yesterday"), or like a payment system ("send your payment to shop@gmail.com")? It seems presented as the former: > you can securely send money to friends and family in the U.S. - without leaving your Gmail inbox but people will assuredly try to use it as the latter. When that happens, how will Google address fraud claim…

If I'd be Google - I'd force senders to have 2-step authentication configured before sending money.

Tradeoff of convenience/friction vs. security if they require it on every financial transaction, though. ACH and credit are pretty reversible.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#226
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Wallet is how old now, three+ years? They didn't even bother adding any other way to pay than credit cards. Someone needs to tell them that there are countries where people simply don't use credit cards. They exist, but at cost, and the culture just isn't there. If they continue innovating in the payment space at this rate, they will maybe have a solution people here can actually use in 2020.

Talking about credit cards, what's the difference between a credit card and just a bank account? At my bank you can get a credit card at an added cost, but it's not needed for anything in the Netherlands so I never looked into it.

[deleted]

Re: Send money with Gmail

#227
post #90

I think this is going to be really big. But it might require actual customer service; that must have made them think twice.

I think that Google Checkout team, as usual, would screw up execution. On my web site users have choices to pay directly (Stripe), PayPal and Google Wallet. New users virtually never use Google Wallet (former Google Checkout).

Given those options I always go for Google Checkout, actually. Paypal doesn't support my country(Lebanon), so that's out of the question. And I try to minimize the number of places that have my CC information. Checkout already has it from my use of the play store on android.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#228
post #118
post #90

I think this is going to be really big. But it might require actual customer service; that must have made them think twice.

The exact same thing could be said about Google Apps, or PayPal - near-total absence of customer service didn't stop adoption of either of those. (To be fair, PayPal's customer service is pretty great now, but that's only in the last 18-24 months. They were the market leader long before they put any real effort into that.)

PayPal has plenty of customer service, and has for a long time. The problem has been that they had very shitty and abusive customer service, though I think they've started to learn their lesson on that.

Re: Send money with Gmail

#229
post #90

I think this is going to be really big. But it might require actual customer service; that must have made them think twice.

They already have enough relationships with governments around the world for all of their data centers and other projects (maps, mail, youtube, etc.) that I think they could do a decent job on this. I expect it'll still be several years before it's a decent competitor to paypal but it'll be nice to finally get some competition in that space (low overhead global payments without a merchant account).

Re: Send money with Gmail

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will better service from Google Fiber, and other large providers, push Comcast to provide a better customer service/support experience?

No, those who care about service will switch to google fiber. Then Comcast will see that the number of complaints about their service is decreasing, and go on to praise their employees. For now companies which should be scared of Google Fiber aren't. It took the US years and lot of tax money to build the infrastructure which current ISPs own. Google has done parts of one city with only 2 more on the way. It will take…

Didn't Google already buy up a ton of dark fiber backbone? GFiber may be closer to disrupting the national ISP market than we think
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