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by SkeuomorphicBee 30 days ago
That is by design. It separates the payment processor so it does just that, just payments. It is like money, once you give it to someone else there is no automatic way to fish it back from their pocket to yours. The correct avenue to deal with fraud, bankruptcy and other malicious actor is the small claims court (or civil court, or criminal court).

The moment you start burdening the payment processor with the roles of judge/referee over all goods and services you end up with the mess we have with CCs where Visa/Mastercard are morality czars that dictate what goods and services are valid or invalid, nuking people and companies out of modern society for their own arbitrary reasons.

Edit: And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.

3 comments

If I get sent a fake (or no) product by someone halfway around the world there's absolutely no way I'm getting my money back in small claims court.
Then use a service that offers escrow. I don't need my groceries to use insurance for the eventuality that the store goes belly-up in the 2 days until I can check that the products arrived in good order

Base payment products should just do payment at operating margins rivaling a non-profit. It's public infrastructure

I'm quite happy with the status quo that I don't need to negotiate escrow with every random online service or store.
That's not the status quo here, but you can often choose to use an american payment mechanism that has this insurance built in. Isn't a selection of things, as we have today, fine then? If these insurers use the cheap transaction service under the hood, and you can choose it directly for a discount, everyone's happy right?

I saw your reply earlier but came back to it because I'm ordering from a new store and they actually offer a discount if you pay with SEPA instead of one of the 11 other options that are various forms of "pay in installments" (take up a credit basically), "pay with insurance", or "pay with your favorite american payment provider". I have no problem paying slightly less than the advertised product price! :) It's a well-known store so imma trust their customer support in case of issues, and the product price is such that insurance makes absolutely no sense (I could bear the loss nearly 100 times over and still make rent this month)

What you’re describing here results in extreme consolidation. The one or two e-commerce giants that figure it out will rule. No startup can ever sell anything online easily. Why would a customer trust a new or upcoming brand or buy anything online?
> their own arbitrary reasons

Outside pressure behind much of it.

In any case, there's a fundamental mismatch between pressure groups and the leverage they can exert through single-consensus. I don't know how to describe the other consensus that is on my brain, but it is distinct.

That makes it a bad design, since every person you interact with has the potential to be a scumbag and not deliver on what you paid for. "Get a lawyer and sue them" or "Rely on your local consumer advocacy agency" cannot be the answers at the kind of scale that will be enabled.

This is the reason I only _ever_ spend money on credit cards, and never use cash or debit cards (European in the US). I've personally had at least three disputes this year resolved in my favor by American Express, and will not sign up for something that suggests courts should do so instead.

(I was editing when you repplied so I'll add it here for you:)

And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.

> in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.

Hard disagree on this - it makes the asymmetry between individual consumer and powerful company too substantial. At least with the status quo, there is another powerful company _on the side of the individual consumer_.

Requiring a court case for every case of unfulfilled contracts which could be resolved trivially by credit card companies would mean I'd done almost nothing else this year besides dealing with that, instead of making three calls to American Express.

At least up til now, this doesn't seem to be a significant problem with iDeal. Any iDeal receiver will need to have at least a Dutch bank account, which requires the bank to be very sure of the identity of the person/people (UBOs) holding the account. So downright fraud is unlikely. If there is, one can file a police report, and hopefully the DA will take it to court.

Disputes between non-fraudulent entities happen of course. But I really don't like some algorithm somewhere taking seemingly arbitrary decisions on that. It usually just amounts to robbing merchants of their money, and adding some exorbitant refund fee to top it of. Settling disputes is what small claims court and dispute committees are for.

Of course, with iDeal now effectively becoming EU-wide, things may get more difficult.

> Any iDeal receiver will need to have at least a Dutch bank account,

Which makes it somewhat less than iDeal for anyone who isn't Dutch. The magic of Visa and Mastercard is they enable commerce between two people, even if they bank on different sides of the planet. Well, not Russia - but they do work in Japan, and if you ever dealt with the Japanese banking system you will know that's a minor miracle.

> This is the reason I only _ever_ spend money on credit cards

Which illustrates one of the most prolific examples of regulatory capture.

Credit cards became mainstream because of that protection, which was a triumph for the payment processors. Whatever they spent on lobbying was a bargain.

There also a large number of typos that happen. Typos in the amount. Typos in email or mobile number where you are sending the funds to (if pushing a payment instead of seller pulling).