I’m still not sure what the author thinks sucks about wallets like ApplePay or GooglePay. They are the most convenient options both online and in-person.
Unless I missed a paragraph, the author never describes and ideal alternative.
Online card payments still suck
91–100 of 119 posts
Re: Online card payments still suck
#92No surprises here. Cards should've been deprecated as a payment method long ago. Brazil's Pix, Netherlands's iDEAL, Poland's BLIK, etc, are all better payment methods that follow a push model (i.e., the customer actively confirms the purchase on their phone) instead of pull model (i.e., I send my card details to the store and it forwards it to the card network). I really hope the EU gets its shit together and moves f…
That's all great till you don't have network, or you're abroad and need to shell out a $15 roaming day pass to pay for a freaking croissant. No thanks.
At least the credit card networks achieved some degree of industry standardization. I can pay with my freaking phone and it requires my fingerprint to validate the payment. I'm not clear what lack of convenience you're referring to
Re: Online card payments still suck
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did this change recently? I had no problem paying with my German Maestro/EC for everything a couple of years ago. (Just like in most European countries, really)
Maestro is a different animal. I only have Visa/MC and I had to carry cash. Two examples were a random restaurant in a mall and a random tiny cigarette shop. At the latter they told me Visa can cost like 10%.
As far as I know, Maestro is (part of? compatible with?) the normal bank card standard that's supported everywhere.
Re: Online card payments still suck
#94I'm still disappointed every time I try to order something at a webshop and they don't support iDeal[0]. That's how online payment should work. Of course it's only a Dutch system, so it's not going to be supported by all international webshops (although Steam does), but if anyone has the scope to introduce a more secure form of online payment, surely it's Visa and MasterCard? Why don't they introduce an iDeal-like pa…
Why should I care about credit card security? I have zero liability, and in 17 years of using them, I maybe had to ask the bank to issue a new credit card number once, and that would have been many years ago. I am sure tons of doctors' offices, hotels, online businesses, daycares, etc have my hand written card number and CVC code or whatever laying around, but even if someone did use it fraudulently, I would just cli…
This is pretty much the exact distinction between the US attitude to cards and the rest of the world. In the US, the ability to dispute a card tx is just part of life.
Everywhere else the banks have forced poor UX onto merchants in the name of shifting liability and improved security.
This is why the US rolled out chip cards with a signature while everyone else has been using chip and PIN for years.
Re: Online card payments still suck
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've recently moved to NL from the USA; iDeal is great! I won't go into the excruciating slog of work that was required to open a Dutch bank account as a US Citizen, but now that I have an account, it's awesome! Account transfers are much faster as well, which is true for most (all?) SEPA countries. I know the US is actively working on a faster/cheaper transfer system but realistically that is still 5+ years away for…
> I won't go into the excruciating slog of work that was required to open a Dutch bank account as a US Citizen I keep hearing about these horror stories but I've only actually experienced it once, years ago in mainland China. I (also a US citizen) moved back to Europe this summer and opened accounts in both DE and NL; I only had to provide my passport, SSN, and proof of address and I was good to go. Am I just pretern…
I think it was a few things. First, I’m not in the Randstad, but in Brabant. I don’t work for ASML or Philips so the company that hired me was not familiar with many of the resources available to expats.
Second, I dutifully listened to the employees who tried to tell me to sign up via the various apps. I went in person to the ABN bank building in Eindhoven where a lady at the front gave me a business card to call a phone number with a disconnected line to attempt to open an account.
Third, I listened to the Reddit when they said Bunq had severely declined in quality and just coming off of Simple in the USA, I was hesitant to join a neobank in a new country with no physical presence should I have a problem that needed to be solved immediately.
Finally, I was not totally aware of FACTA and what that meant for me as a customer. I eventually created an account at the Regiobank in my small village, but I didn’t know about the requirements so my account was delayed for use for two weeks while they manually updated my details.
Consequently, after the shitshow at ABN, I walked down the street to ING and was able to make an appointment for the next day. However, because INGs entire sign up is app driven now, I was left without a login because I signed up in person due to the FACTA requirement. I’ve requested the login to be reset and mailed to me twice (an option they offer, I assume for old folks) and I still can’t access my account online or in the app. I opened the account in mid-September.
So yeah, some of it was my fault, but as far as ING and ABN are concerned, it’s pure incompetence.
Re: Online card payments still suck
#96Seems like this article is only about United States without being aware of it. Many countries in Europe and Asia have much better payment solutions than the states.
It's actually about what is supported natively in Web browsers and what the vendors of those browsers have done to make it better.
Sadly you are correct that the mentality of the browser vendors is VERY card (and US) centric so accommodations for other payment methods get very little attention.
This is not a fault of the working group participants who have tried to push for everything from iDEAL to crypto but in the end it's pretty clear we're heading for a wallet-dominated world and we all know who those wallets will come from unless we push back.
Re: Online card payments still suck
#97If only there was an instantaneous, nearly free (cost per transaction), opensource, anyone-can-access, infinitely scalable, infinitely interoperable, payment rail that we could start building solutions on top of...
If you're referring to cryptocurrency, isn't the average cost-per-transaction for something like Ethereum on the order of $40-$50?
Parent is a Bitcoin maximalist, just to be mindful.
Currently it's about $0.85 USD to send ETH or $2.50 USD to send ERC20[1]. Most people will suggest not using a L1 as a payment system, but instead something application-specific like a rollup or state channel. In Ethereum those will be in the range of 5 - 20 cents per transaction[2], and may be much lower after EIP-4844[3].
Other non-Ethereum blockchains and L2s have similar range of low fees.
Re: Online card payments still suck
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're referring to cryptocurrency, isn't the average cost-per-transaction for something like Ethereum on the order of $40-$50?
It’s more like $1 these days due to the bear market, granted these remain high fees. Cheaper payments can be sent on a zero-knowledge Layer 2 like starknet or zksync. Beta services but usable (except the whole on-ramp off-ramp part). Once sharding is implemented, fees are likely to drop to sub-cent levels. Ideally payments would be anonymized on a privacy-preserving L3, but I don’t think those exist yet
Aztec is live on mainnet:
Re: Online card payments still suck
#99> "The security of your card details is only marginally improved" Please don't be ridiculous, I understand you have to instill fear in the people reading this for them to use your service, but the security of what you described before to today has improved by orders of magnitude: - I'm going to guess no HTTPS 20 years ago (it was formally specified 22 years ago). - Merchant employee has access to the raw data of your…
I think you miss the point that card payments should never have evolved to still require us to type sensitive data into a web form at all.
Also, don't forget that 2FA etc are not ubiquitous, especially not in the US.
As I implied, PCI DSS is lipstick on a pig. We could have done much better in the last 20 years. Now Apple and Google are doing it for us and we won't have any choice but to get further locked into their walled gardens.
Re: Online card payments still suck
#100No surprises here. Cards should've been deprecated as a payment method long ago. Brazil's Pix, Netherlands's iDEAL, Poland's BLIK, etc, are all better payment methods that follow a push model (i.e., the customer actively confirms the purchase on their phone) instead of pull model (i.e., I send my card details to the store and it forwards it to the card network). I really hope the EU gets its shit together and moves f…
That's all great till you don't have network, or you're abroad and need to shell out a $15 roaming day pass to pay for a freaking croissant. No thanks. At least the credit card networks achieved some degree of industry standardization. I can pay with my freaking phone and it requires my fingerprint to validate the payment. I'm not clear what lack of convenience you're referring to
Well, I don't see how any of those problems are a reasonable issue for online payments.
By the way, most countries still have cash. What is important, because the credit card network is known for going offline once in a while.