Ask HN: A universal app for buying anything anywhere?
I'd like to pay for things with my phone. I call up Jimmy Johns twice a week for a sandwich. They take my credit card every single time, even though they know my name and address. I suppose they don't want to keep credit cards in their system. Fine. But the same thing occurs everywhere throughout the web. I find something that I want to buy online, and I have to type my number in again.
There are solutions out there. Chrome saves some cc information. But not all sites implement it. There are plugins, of course. But if I switch over to my iPad, or iPhone, or a friends, then I have to go through all this again.
So the new iPhone is going to use NFC to send some kind of tokenized cc information for me to pay for stuff in real life. Great.
But what about buying things online? What about buying things remotely (like over the phone).
Here's what I'd like to see, an app that can be pinged by anyone, to notify me that someone would like to charge my credit card. I call Dominoes. They take my order. I get a push notification saying Dominoes wants to make a charge. I swipe, enter a code, and the charge goes through.
You could pay by phone for anything, anywhere, using your bank account, credit card, whatever: but you'd only have to enter that information on installation of the app.
So that's the idea. Implementation details might include using Stripe connect as the backend. Maybe implementing IOS's thumb-reader, if that's available as an API (not a IOS dev here).
I can't quite understand why this doesn't exist yet, or why it is not in wide use, or if it is in wide use, why I haven't heard of it.
3 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 20.8 ms ] threadThe reason this doesn't exist now is because of the way banks and credit cards work. They're issuer-centric, not user-centric.
Your credit card isn't yours. It's your bank's, and it's issued in partnership with the credit card network provider, MasterCard or Visa. The credit card network provider has the relationship with the merchant, which is why some merchants don't take Discover or American Express. Both the bank and the credit card network make money off of fees from the merchant. Yes, it's you who has to spend the money, but you're not the customer of the two people with the power (the bank and the credit card network): you're ancillary in their equations. You're only valuable to the merchant, and the merchant would prefer you to pay in cash.
Apple Pay is the first to do this for the exact reasons they stated at the launch: they're not trying to make money off the transaction. They're making money off of you, the user, by selling you hardware. So it's in their best interest to give you this great feature, which is user-centric payment, abstracting away the merchant and the bank and the credit card network, because it sells you hardware.
Cell phone networks have the same problem; your SIM card isn't yours, it's your network provider's, despite being your electronic ID to them. There's no way for you to consolidate or control all these pieces of your digital ID, and there's no incentive with the way the industries are set up to allow you to.