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Comment by jdnenej | Hacker News Reader

And yet I still end up just calling the pizza place by phone since it's easier than navigating a slow and awkward UI and having to enter my payment details rather than paying on pickup.

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Apple Pay is what changes this equation. It has your payment details and address already queued up. So you can click the size, click the topping, tap order and you’re done. It can literally be a 10 second exercise, as fast as looming up the number and dialing.

Why they don’t all have Apple Pay as an option, I do not know.

More to the point, that the web didn’t standardize UIs for payment and address information is probably a $100 billion mistake at least - in terms of what it costs everyone to do it their own way, and in lost time in having to constantly fill in the same form again and again.

Where I live I stick to using one of the two dominant platforms for ordering food. The UI is half-decent, but more imporantly, it's the same no matter which restaurant you source the order from. That's a relief compared to the garbage individual pizza places put on-line.

Does it remember your payment details? That would make it a win all by itself.

AFAIK it can, though I don't use it - I don't trust these sites that much. Web flow of paying with my bank account is fast enough, and with recent popularization of a mobile payment system, the flow can be as fast as pulling out my phone, PIN-authing to my bank app, typing a six digit number shown on my phone into a web form, and confirming the purchase on the phone. Takes 30 seconds.

I'm glad there's a safe way to do it. But that honestly does sound pretty complicated...

Perhaps the fault of my description. It is really simple. They payment process with BLIK (the mobile payments system) boils down to: select you want to pay with BLIK on the merchant's site[0], type a six digit number into a box, press OK, press OK on the phone. An extra speed bump is involved with knowing what number to type - it's a randomly-generated token with 3-minute expiry time; to get it, you need to login to your bank's app. All the apps I use (perhaps all of them in Poland) offer a simplified login flow here anyway; for me, it's "click the bank icon, click BLIK, type 4 digit PIN, see the six-digit token".

It really is fast and easy[2] enough that it's become my default payment method in Poland, but honestly, prior to that, I kept going through the slightly more involved flow described in [0]. I really don't like giving my card details out, especially that at least three large e-commerce sites I did give those details to can pull money out of my account with zero confirmation or notice beyond me clicking the "buy!" button on the site, so I assume a criminal with access to that data could do it too (and it's a debit card, so I can't exactly do a chargeback).

[0] - Or with one of the intermediaries[1] that you know handles it, which without mobile payments I'd be using anyway. The intermediary lets you turn what would be "give your card details to the merchant/payment processor" flow into "login to your bank directly through your bank's login page to just authorize a transfer request from one of your accounts" one. The nice thing about it is that a) it's faster (I remember my bank credentials, not my card number), b) the whole is is PUSH, not PULL - I send them money, c) it's not tied to a card; I can pay from cardless accounts, and d) the merchant doesn't get my card number or account details. The UI flow is simple too, there's a string of redirects and prefills that make a payment with the intermediary just a few clicks, a login, and some 2FA thrown in the middle.

[1] - Like these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayU.

[2] - And safe! When you can get improvement on all three of the trade-off triangle, it only shows how much the older system sucks.

If you are just ordering a simple pepperoni or cheese or something that probably is easier. The payment part can generally be solved by just telling it "cash", though. Noone complains if you actually pay with a card at the store.

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