Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Some questions:

- Would ACH solve an issue like this? There are some clean interfaces (e.g. Plaid), and chargebacks are not trivial.

- Would 3-D secure solve the chargeback problem? As I understand it, it shifts liability to the consumer, not the business.

- Is blockchain being adopted anywhere for micropayments like this?




> Would ACH solve an issue like this?

Still doesn't solve the problem of people with shared accounts and then one half pays for porn without telling the other. It happens so often UK banks have ways of looking up subscriptions.

People would reverse the transaction, still enjoy porn and the company goes out of business.

> Would 3-D secure solve the chargeback problem?

As far as I know, that's a European only thing? It shifts it to the consumer, but people get very angry on the phone to the bank causing a higher chargeback rate.


3-D Secure is not a european only thing. If someone successfully signs up with 3-D Secure, the onus is on the issuing card's bank, not the merchant, so that would be ideal.

The problem we ran into was that since the 3-D Secure verification (which is a page you redirect the surfer to, or an iframe or similar) is handled by the credit card issuing bank, each page is different, and since no one actually uses 3-D Secure, when we tried to implement it, it mostly didn't work.

Reducing chargebacks is great, but if you lose 30% of your sales by redirecting them to broken pages, it defeats the purpose.


One of the points of 3D Secure is that it shifts the responsibility from the sells to the card company or bank, not necessarily the customer. So I don't believe the bank has much incentive to do a chargeback, as they will be the ones covering it.

Also I don't believe chargeback on a 3D Secured transaction doesn't count as a strike towards the seller, not to sure about that one though. It would seem reasonable not to count it, seeing as the seller was in good faith, and the card company claims to have verified the buyer... but the rules of online credit card payment are anything but fair.


> Is blockchain being adopted anywhere for micropayments like this?

These aren't really micropayments, just regular small payments. Cheap cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash work well for these amounts.

As a bonus you can stay private enough from your spouse and the chargeback issue basically goes away from the business side.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: