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Comment by cosmodisk | Hacker News Reader

What you get by shopping at Amazon isn't just the pricing, it's the convenience not to enter your details again and again and again for the sake of getting a single item. I'd love if someone could solve it and instead of 'sign up here' I'd get 'pay with superDuperSingleSolutionForAllECommerce' and it's done. Maybe I should ask for VC money and start working on it?..

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The very problem that PayPal solves, and why Elon now builds rockets (and Google Pay, and Pay with Amazon, to come full circle). However, inevitably the vendor wants your details in their own database and now you're back to having to interact with their terrible UX, just with the benefit of a breach no longer exfiltrating your credit card info

That's not even mentioning the network effect, where a service has to have enough adoption or demand to "force" other merchants to accept it

I understand the vendor wants my details,I'd want it too, but the reality is that the buyer is voting for convenience and going to Amazon instead. Paypal kind of does it,but only to a degree-I'd love wider spectrum of payment methods+ some flexibility on what the vendor can/can't do with my data,similar to how app permissions work on Android. If it's some 'local brooms and stick', they only get my address for delivery,but if it's some specialist store with fountains of knowledge,then yes,sure,send me texts,emails and so on.

Pay pal doesn’t solve the low transaction friction problem at all. They’re less convenient than entering credit card info over and over again. The last time I logged into my account, their site was half-down.

On top of that, you could fill a large book with descriptions of esoteric con jobs that only work on PayPal.

Elon builds rockets because of a well-timed exit, followed by lots of hard work and success building Tesla.

I don’t know when you last used PayPal but it is an incredibly convenient way to pay on vendor websites. I use it 75% of the time I do online shopping.

I would almost always prefer to click “pay with PayPal” than start some new account or fill in details on a given vendors site.

I would go so far as to say that if large enough retailers who already have storefronts were savvy enough, PayPal could make Amazon obsolete.

I too, on usps.com, on domain websites, on subscriptions, basically everywhere non-Google properties. On Google I use the card itself, because Chrome has all of my cards saved in.

Amazon is more than minimal-friction payment, though. It’s also discovery.

I don’t like their discovery, personally. I know I don’t represent the average shopper- but I generally know what I want before I buy it online or I am using a specialty retailer for discovery.

And a sensible history of sales, search across it, and find out how sold me what.

Also their return policy. I recently purchased something from Amazon rather then the producer's website because they only offered a 2 week return policy plus I'd need to be responsible for the shipping.

I know how returns work with Amazon. If I buy directly, are they going to give me the run around if there's a problem?

The return policy also leads to inflated prices. Since there is (effectively) no way to dispute a buyer's return, sellers must eat the cost when it happens--and they're out fees already charged in the purchase transaction.

The result is exactly as you'd expect: the items sold by third party sellers on amazon have a large markup just to produce break-even margins. Source: my wife, who ran a business including third-party selling on Amazon for a while.

> no way to dispute a buyer's return

This is another hidden benefit of shopping on Amazon: they see my (egregiously long) shopping history. I'm sure they have some risk profile on me that suggests I'm not buying and returning a bunch of stuff to rip off sellers.

If I say something some pack of kids underwear is the wrong size, or a $15 LED light didn't arrive, or a pair of boots needs to get exchanged, it's dealt with in maybe 60 seconds of clicking on their site.

There's a bunch of liquidator/clearance sites promising lower prices with the caveat of "all sales are final".

My guess is that people buying high-end headphones are just not comfortable with such setup.

Of course they will.

I bought a product from a seller on their website once, but mistakenly ordered the wrong colour. Upon reaching out to them, I was told I had to ship it back myself (at a multiple of the item's cost), or buy a new one.

Meanwhile the product was listed on Amazon for the same price. Did I also mention that when I ordered the product initially, it came from an Amazon facility? Why does the seller get to benefit from Amazon's logistics but I get stiffed on the return?

I’ve found Amazon’s return policy to be extremely unpredictable. In some cases, there’s no problem. In others, the seller says I need to pay return shipping to some random factory shipping dock in China (at a large multiple of the price I paid for the item).

Also someone you trust to intercede if things go wrong. Who knows what happens when I buy from some site I've never heard of and don't get my stuff or have problems with it. I prefer to deal with large, well-known sites for this reason.

Isn’t this the same as “pay with PayPal/Amazon pay/etc”?

> Isn’t this the same as “pay with PayPal/Amazon pay/etc”?

There is always the issue of how well the integration performs. It is not uncommon for merchants software to get confused in the process and ship your order to the billing address or for other things to go wrong. When that happens, you now have to deal with customer service of varying quality.

In most cases, the purchase decision is easier for me to make on Amazon than anywhere else. I've been a customer since almost the first days and while I can count a lot of minor irritations, there isn't anything better.

I’ve seen a good number of sites recently where you can pay with your Amazon account or PayPal. Also with browsers auto filling everything these days including credit card numbers, I haven’t found it too troublesome purchasing one-offs from stores online.

I entered my credit card on a small online store, they are legit, but got hacked and didn't even know. Months later I got three Netflix subscriptions and a few hundreds 'Uber Eats' billings on my credit card invoice. Got the money back but wasted a lot of energy.

Yeah exactly. It's the vetting, not the actual entering of information.

Klarna does this quite well here in Sweden. Almost too well, it often loads an Iframe with my information filled in already on a checkout page of a random store, without any input from me.

Wasn't there a data leak with Klarna?

> it’s the convenience not to enter your details again...

With more and more adoption of ApplePay and GooglePay to power the checkout experience this advantage might away..

On safari you’ll see the Apple Pay button, which automatically fills in your details on sites which offer it. It’s super convenient when it’s offered.

Apple Pay and PayPal when integrates properly can handle it all - address, billing, etc.

But most sites simply tack it on at the end as a payment option and ask for an account, address, etc beforehand.

I don't notice because Bitwarden takes care of entering my details for me.

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