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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Assume your solution exists and I can sign up for it. How do I answer the following email:

"hi I bought bingo maker on my mac at school. I want to use it with my home phone number but it says it is in free trial mode. help!!!"

(She means "email address" not phone number, she doesn't know that it is irrelevant how she bought it, and you can safely assume she is incapable of finding the original email she got when she purchases the "bingo maker", which may or may not actually be the product I sell.)

Or, more worrisomely:

"sucks I can't make birthday cards with this. Give me a refund. - Cindy (bob@example.com)"

You really, really want to capture customer details with payments.

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The payment platform should have communication and refund supported via the API or their website?

So for each buyer, there will be a 'Payment support' button that will be displayed on the Bingo Maker page. When someone uses that, the website owners will see a unique number, and a message. The unique number can be used to check/reverse payments made through the solution, and to respond to the message.

To people who suggest "unique ids" being communicated between seller and buyer - I'm selling some shareware on the web and sometimes I'm getting emails from people who bought my software several years ago. Since then they re-formatted their drive, lost email archives, changed email address and so on. Sometimes they even have slightly different name in "From". Payment processors I use (RegNow and share*it) capture tons of information I could use to authenticate the buyer and give back their license. There's absolutely no guarantee that unique id will stay with them.

I think the idea is that the payment processor (visa, mastercard) keeps the mapping between unique id and customer. They handle the authentication, and then gives the customer their "support number" or "receipt code" or whatever you want to name it.

> You really, really want to capture customer details with payments.

Also Visa/Mastercard dont really give you the option to not capture the address unless you're a big reliable merchant.

Not true - it's trivial for businesses the size of BCC with e.g. Stripe or Paypal Website Payments Pro. A merchant processor may have told you differently, but they, ahem, are not exactly the most trustworthy companies one works with.

Well the back-end payment processing will have to pass the seller some sort of identifier with the purchase, at the very least something like an email address, so that you can have an account for that person. Then the seller will want to assign a license and/or customer number for their own records. If she doesn't know her email address or license, then yes she is screwed. Just like when I try to return things without a receipt.

She can, of course, dispute payments with the credit card processor or whoever paid the seller. Even when a merchant provides clear paths to get refunds on their site, some people just prefer to do a chargeback which costs the seller a lot more than the purchase price.

How would you do that today?

Ask for her credit card details? Presumably if she is unable to come up with her email, she is also unable to remember which card she used?

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