We started out in Singapore and the only payment processor we could use there was Paypal. If started now we would have used something more easier and better like Stripe :) That being said, we should be switching over to them soon.
- When PayPal raises a dispute, they really want to see a shipping confirmation for a product, or something really closely equivalent. Make sure you have very clear records prepared to show them, and hope that keeps them happy.
- Don't leave any money in an account PayPal controls. Get your money out of PayPal into your bank, and get your money out of any bank account linked to PayPal into an account PayPal has no access to, as quickly as possible after you receive it. When the inevitable dispute happens, you'll feel much happier if they can't sit on a pile of your money.
- Have a kill-switch plan to shut down new orders going into PayPal. PayPal will often happily lock your account while continuing to take money from customers, who will then want to receive their product even though PayPal won't give you their money. Worst case, that produces more disputes; best case, PayPal has increasing amounts of your money to sit on. Whether this means another payment provider or just a "we're sorry, we can't take orders right now, can we put you on a waiting list?" page, make sure you can stop getting money via PayPal the moment PayPal screws you.
Check out balancedpayments.com. It's a processing, escrow, and payouts in one API. Also the founding team were early employees at Milo.com and worked on this specific issue of SKU level data cataloging & matching.
disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Balanced and this is a shameless plug for my product. :)
I was also the head of data acquisition at Milo.com and am fascinated by this problem. I have to admit I'm skeptical this scale of product matching and metadata cleaning can be done, but I'm very happy for you if you've succeeded where I failed. In either case, best of luck.
isn't there? From what I understand Quora has been pretty stagnant. It failed to go mainstream. Sure the valley people know of it's existence...but most people? not so much
Digg didn't collapse because of hardware or headcount...they collapsed because they trashed their product with unnecessary changes and pissed off their user base
Sure, the fact that they had a huge headcount, meant that they had to take more risk to try to monetize...but the nail in their coffin wasn't cost...but loss of traffic
yeah, YC should have a page on their site with a list of all the funded startups sorted by batches. Maybe a small PR blurb by each startup to describe it.
They have to pay for infrastructure, they have to pay for customer support, they have to pay for fraudulent transactions and on and on. I think most credit card companies have something like 10%-15% ROI
Their fraud costs are not what you make them seem. The credit card companies do not take on the risk for fraud most of the time. They push that risk onto the merchants.
This is why large e-commerce companies have giant fraud departments trying to prevent fraudulent orders and charges on their site; because when they occur, they generally just eat the loss.
Actually the merchant is only liable for the loss if they did not follow all of the rules and regulations for processing the credit card.
From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud#Merchants):
"The liability for the fraud is determined by the details of the transaction. If the merchant retrieved all the necessary pieces of information and followed all of the rules and regulations the financial institution would bear the liability for the fraud. If the merchant did not get all of the necessary information they would be required to return the funds to the financial institution. This is all determined through the credit card processory."
From what I have seen, it is very common for the merchant to be liable for losses on a card not present transaction (e.g. online retail) but the credit card company stomaches the losses for a card present transaction.
I suspect that online merchants could reduce their liability by implementing things like Verified by Visa but choose not to because it causes them to lose too many legitimate sales.
because when you go up and up the ladder, eventually you end up with 5-6 huge companies that control everything...not too surprising when the companies end up with similar pricing.
I mean take credit cards for example. You have Visa and Mastercard with the majority of the market. Then you have American Express and Discover that have a tiny portion.
That's it. And that's more or less worldwide.
You'd think since the coming of the internet, we'd have at least some competition in this space. Just imagine how much money there is, in join Mastercard/Visa as a top 3 credit card.
Square is a little lower down the chain, so the main thing they are giving here is passing through their huge savings down the pipeline. But even then it's not 100%.
Their basic pricing is 2.75%. So essentially you need to sell $10,000 worth of stuff before you start profiting off the $275/mo...and you only have until $20,000 before you go up to the regular 2.75% pricing.
And 2.75% is pretty high...for credit card processing.
So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay attention.
Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd eliminate most of the driver caused accidents
You are suggesting human's will run into it more often right? I sincerely doubt we will see too many autonomous-car-at-fault crashes. The blacked out Lexus SUV's I saw at a Google event a few weeks ago were very discrete minus the velodyne sensor. If it adds an credibility I was on a team at the Victorville final in 2007. :)
As an aside, I've been waiting to buy my Google car for 5 long years. During this time I've become so disenfranchised with day to day driving that I avoid it at all costs. Commuting via roads in a car is such a mundane task that is, in my opinion, a solved problem. Bring on the autonomous cars!
Commuting does kind of suck if you're trying to roll in during rush hour. But without super-heavy traffic I find driving to be rather enjoyable in itself. Even more so if you're riding a motorcycle :) Perhaps the problem is not commuting, but the fact that many companies want their employees at work at 9:00 and out of work at 5:00?
The problem for me isn't commuting, it's having to invest so much money into a huge pile of metal and plastic that someone distracted by someone or something in their own pile of metal and plastic can destroy in an instance, possibly killing me and anyone with me. Or maybe I get distracted and the result is similar.
I just don't see the few cases where it's enjoyable to be worth the other costs. I'd consider it similar to smoking in that regard.
Feel free to refrain from driving, in that case; just don't get in the way (in a legal sense) of those who still want to.
Smoking is a much greater nuisance than driving, because a nearby smoker will foul the air for a fairly large radius through no choice of the people around them. Driving only affects other people who choose to be on the road.
Comparing to smoking seems to be a huge stretch to me. One thing virtually guarantees cancer and an eventual unpleasant death while providing no measurable benefits at all, and the other allows you to easily travel all over the place cheaply with a relatively small chance of a major accident.
That's not true at all, the incidence rate of lung cancer in smokers is less than 20%. That's still much higher than for non-smokers (0.4% - 2%), but hardly a "virtual guarantee".
My wife sees a neurosurgeon who's an eight hour round trip away. I've driven her there and back at least six times this year.
With a Google car, I'd a) be able to send her by herself and b) even if I had to come, I could work on the way, meaning I'd have more than a week's worth of vacation/sick time restored.
You could also hire a limo. I suppose in the future you'll be able to rent a google car for a day, but you don't have to wait for self-driving cars. They're here today, the self just happens to be a human.
I think $10,000 is a big over-estimate, but even that would be spread out over the life of the car. I'd happily pay $1000 a year to not have to worry about driving.
Hopefully I'll be wearing my google glass too! So, I guess so.
True privacy is very hard. You could set up a camera to read plates at some choice points and know the whereabouts of most of the people in your city. If you want to do something privately you have to act deliberately in this day and age.
To set up such cameras, you'd need permission from our National Data Protection Commission and if you were to store footage with car plates you'd fall under the Personal Data Protection Law which requires you to either get explicit consent or fall under one of the few exceptions in the law (and no, tracking random people isn't one of them).
And even if you qualify, you can only use that data for the specific purpose you said you needed it for and it needs to be well protected (for example, a governmental CCTV installation was suspended because the recording weren't being well encrypted).
Facebook does analytics...they aren't some tiny startup...surely they track the quality of their traffic...so they know that 70-80% of their ad traffic comes from bots.
So Facebook is knowingly profiting from this, and they have the resources to fix this...but they don't since this is making so much money for them.
