Daniel Davies argued that we're never going to have a working "micropayments" system, because a lot of the overhead in the current credit-card payment system is devoted to handling fraudulent or mishandled payments, and the cost of that part is proportional to the number of payments, not the amount of money going through the system.
Paypal customer-service horror stories are perfect illustration of this principle. If you want to take money by credit card without forking over a massive chunk of it to the credit-card processing network, then you have to go through PayPal. But PayPal can only keep its overhead costs down by spending the absolute minimum on customer service. If not less.
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Date: 2006-01-05 07:50 pm (UTC)Paypal customer-service horror stories are perfect illustration of this principle. If you want to take money by credit card without forking over a massive chunk of it to the credit-card processing network, then you have to go through PayPal. But PayPal can only keep its overhead costs down by spending the absolute minimum on customer service. If not less.
A few years ago, back when phishing was a new thing, I got phishing letters that pretended to be from PayPal and from e-gold. I didn't have accounts with either service, but I figured I would be a good citizen and let them know that this was going on. E-gold sent me back a thank-you note. At PayPal, as far as I can tell, my message was untouched by human hands, and whatever Visual Basic script read my letter didn't have the foggiest idea what I was trying to say.