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by RikNieu 1773 days ago
Why do all major companies act like this? Facebook, Google, PayPal, Stripe...

Is this being taught in some Ivy League module somewhere? I'm genuinely baffled.

3 comments

Because they can, they pay no price for it That's what happens when you have monopolies and politicians who are supposed to antitrust them are corrupted by them
They might not be paying a big price today, but they do pay a price - their reputation is damaged and when other potential customers look at who to use, they give more consideration to alternatives.
Amazon is the only big company I know that, at least, seems to care. I had horrible experiences with MercadoLibre and it's payments platform.
It doesn’t scale. As soon as you start doing things that don’t scale at scale, costs soar.
How many businesses are they having to "shut down without explanation" that it doesn't scale? I understand if this was something like not responding to a wrong charge/refund etc for one customer. But here we are talking about shutting down someone's business without explanation. I do not think "scaling" is the problem here.

Also as someone else mentioned, as much as I love hating on Amazon, customer support is one place where they are absolutely outstanding. I have been able to reach out to their chat support and get issues resolved multiple times (refunds/item returns etc). If Amazon can scale it, then so can these payment processors.

Sure, but people can only focus on so much at once. To achieve Amazon levels of customer support at Amazon scale, you need years of sacrificing other things in pursuit of customer service.

See this Jeff Bezos interview from 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GltlJO56S1g