I realize this article is one data point but I'd offer that I have a completely opposite data point.
1. We accidentally turned off our main Intercom in-trial campaign for a segment of users during an AB test and were surprised how much lower the conversion was. We re-ran the test ensuring both sides had our Intercom in-trial campaign on. It increased in-trial conversion by 25%.
2. We do pay a lot for Intercom (10 person support team, tens of thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of leads) but we also use it a god damn ton for new customer campaigns, activation, churn prevention, reactivation, etc and by in-app, email, and mobile notifications. Replacing all of this would not be cheap.
3. Intercom can definitely be a crutch for bad UX. But you'll only know of those problems if you're actually getting this feedback. It's then on you to have the internal process for addressing common questions or requests in order to reduce the volume of help requests for specific topics.
Perhaps I should have added more context to the title and text as the purpose of the post seems lost to most commenters.
Rebecca Meyer is the daughter of Eric Meyer who you may know through through his two decades of work on behalf of web development and web standards. He is the author of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and the widely used Reset CSS (http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/).
I would assume that many (if not most) users of Hacker News have benefited from Eric's work.
Rebecca died from cancer on Saturday on her 6th birthday. As per the link from Jeffrey Zeldman's blog, there is an effort to get #663399Becca trending today, (June 12th) in a show of solidarity.
Perhaps someone who runs their own company can answer this question for me: If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from customers who don't have credit cards?
Are your customers exclusively in North America? Or do you just write those customers off (which is a valid option if PayPal integration would be that painful)?
Adding PayPal as a payment option has been an enormous pain for us but a non-consequently amount of our revenue comes from customers either without credit cards or with cards which always fail on international transactions. I see no alternative to PayPal for these customers.
If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from
customers who don't have credit cards?
If a customer doesn't have a credit card or a debit card that your payment gateway accepts, you deal with them the same way you deal with customers who don't have computers.
In the western world, people without credit or debit cards are such a small portion of the population that this policy of ignoring such users is worthwhile. In developing countries however, there are many services that aim to bridge this gap. I dont know how good they are, or how successful they will be, but people are certainly trying to access this market.
Actually, as a student in Germany, most of people I know don't have or want a credit card (which is a major annoyance with Google Checkout, since they accept _only_ credit card payment). That's - depending on your product of course - not that small a market. I would argue that this is the case in other countries, too.
My girlfriend's online business accepts bank transfers if customers can't pay online. "Go to this bank and deposit $X to account Y".
Maybe it doesn't scale too well, but at her business scale it still works for the exception cases and money is money. If you're biggest problem is too many people depositing money to your bank account, that's not a bad problem.
When you go to make a payment, it logs into your bank account and does the transfer for you. So you get an instant receipt, without having to wait for the money to show up in the merchants bank account.
We have a staggering number of customer who pay us through PayPal because they don't have a credit card or a debit card which clears through Mastercard/Visa (which is the standard in most countries).
Moneybookers is a fairly decent alternative. I assume you're talking about mainland Europe where credit card penetration is less prevalent.
Moneybookers interface is terrible, and they will expose your customers to this horrible interface. Their customer service seems to be confused but I've never heard horror stories.
There are payment solutions geared towards European customers so that you can accept bank transfers, etc.
"everyone I know" is not a useful sample to approximate the customers of an online business with international customers.
Where payment options are concerned, VISA/Mastercard branded debit cards are the exact same thing as credit cards. And in many countries, the average citizen has neither. They may have a debit card that's part of some national payment network, they may be used to buying stuff online via their mobile phone account, or in cash at their corner convenience store, or via wire transfer from their bank account.
Paypal allows payment via a MANY such schemes you have never heard about. That is their USP, and something no startup can easily "disrupt".
I use Paypal for one reason (as the consumer); it adds an extra layer of protection for me. I don't want to give my CC details to every site I buy from. And then have to check my CC statement everyday to make sure nothing was hacked along the way.
For a consumer, Paypal makes it very easy to manage payments, receipts, and any other issues.
By the way, never ever use a debt card online. You're handing over access to your bank account.
My personal bank also has similar verbiage for my debit card. They also mention that internet purchases are considered non-PIN purchases and are offered the same protection.
Yes, there is more risk since money can be taken directly out of your account instead of going against your credit, but there are mitigations in place.
I repeat this almost every time this topic comes up:
With a credit card, you can say that the charge was fraudulent and they will take the charge(s) off and you're not on the hook. With a debit card, you're out the money of the fraudulent charge while the bank investigates. From my personal experience, this can take a few days to 3 weeks before the bank puts the money back in your account. If the charge happens to put your account into overdraft, you may still have to pay the overdraft fee which may be hard to get overturned.
I pretty much only use my debit card as an ATM card. Very rarely do I actually use it as a debit card (there are rare instances where I may need to)
Conclusion: Don't use your debit card online if you have a credit card.
Used to work in the industry manufacturing and programming these cards. You are exactly correct, the credit network provides more protection for the cardholder than using your debit card.
With the bank account, they may not reverse fees or other issues that arise as a result. For example, I had a fraudulent charge on a debit card. They reversed it, which is fine, but i was still hit with an overdraft because of a scheduled ACH payment which, at that time, dragged me into negative balance. So there are differences between debit and credit cards.
The only problem with debit cards is that MasterCard and Visa don't cover everyone. For example MasterCard also runs Maestro [1] in the UK which lots of online payment systems seem to neglect (I had to setup another bank account with another bank to get my hands on a Visa Debit card for this very reason).
Huh? Debit transactions are not easy to reverse, at all, and in the U.S. at least are covered by much less generous consumer protection laws than are credit card transactions.
I was of course only talking about developed countries ;)
Really, afaik in europe and for sure in germany this is totally easy. It is not equally easy to reverse a transaction you started yourself. But when another person has you account-number and the public data belonging to this, all he can do is a "lastschrift" (direct debit), which is easily reverseable.
No need to downvote me. The USA is different than europe, and in this regards way behind.
Sure, those are different things. Maybe I misunderstood what the first comment was talking about, as I know of no system where you enter your debit card number to do anything.
This just highlights the fact that our global banking system works very differently in different parts of the world. And maybe, to close the cicle, as the article claims paypal really shouldn't forget this, as it has to behave differently outside of the US if it wants to stay successful. A different environment probably always needs a different strategy.
Whatever that is, a debit card by MasterCard or VISA..
Me? Got my first credit card with 30, when I moved to Israel. That thing's invalid by now. Here in Germany I have a direct debit card (likely ~everyone~ has one, it's the one you use for the ATM as well), issued by my bank.
Now, I can use Paypal. In Germany (and probably more places) they offer to connect a regular bank account. So - Paypal can withdraw from my bank account, I can pay with Paypal where people otherwise insist on a type of payment that I don't like (Paypal's not the nicest thing ever by itself, but 'it works').
In my circle, credit cards are still mistrusted, ~rare~ (as in at least 2 out of 3 won't have one) and really just for collecting debt or buying stuff on your company's name. People around me are waiting for Google Play (oh I HATE that name) gift cards, because they'd really like to buy apps some time..
While Mastercard/Visa debit cards are common in many countries (they certainly are in the UK, for example), there are places they're unheard of. New Zealand bank cards, for example, are typically not those kinds of debit cards and can't be easily used over the internet. They are almost universally accepted in NZ though, rather more so than debit cards in the UK where it's not that uncommon to find pubs or cafes that have a minimum charge or, in rare cases, don't take them.
I have a Visa debitcard, but it is only good for use in ATM and stores. To overcome this I get a bunch of Visa gift cards from my bank that I can put money into and use online.
Depends on the business. Some people might buy gift tokens (with cash, using a friend who does have a valid payment method). This is useful on, for example, Amazon.
In the UK we have "prepaid credit cards"[1] which could be useful for some people who are otherwise unable to get credit.
[1] confusing name, because they never give you credit, and I don't think they have the same protections as normal credit cards.
I don't know what the cash/stock split was, but it's worth mentioning the LinkedIn's IPO raised $352M* so buying SlideShare was just under 34% of all the money they raised.
Linkedin has revenue though, they're not just burning cash. Wikipedia tells me they grossed $243M last year, so a purchase like this doesn't sound unreasonable.
Yes, the 100K is based on a back-of-the-envelope, but for a startup with zero revenue every development and design hour we can spare helps us focus on the real task at hand: figuring out our market fit and making a great product.
This is less about supporting this browser or that browser and more about making sound business decisions and putting our users’ needs first. We’d like to think they would rather see requested features over support for a browser they don’t use.
Nope. Not even IE10. If they pop Webkit rendering into IE maybe we'd consider it.
There also just aren't that many users showing up to our site using IE. That graph in the article is straight from Google Analytics for our main landing page.
IE 10 is a high quality standards compliant browser. Webkit rendering is not the web. You should support it. And Opera. And IE9 unless you absolutely require features it does not support.
You need a business case to write standards compliant accessible code that is browser agnostic?
WWW - as envisioned by Berners Lee - is getting worse.
> Berners-Lee identifies universality as one of Web’s key principles, providing people with the freedom to link to anything, regardless of hardware, software, or Internet connection.
I pay my rent with money, not with good intentions by some guy who has been granted a nighthood.
That said I assume a fairly standard webpage is rendered decently in Opera so I wouldn't block it (as I would haave done to IE if it had had the market share of opera).
I would say that the responsibility on the developer for that vision to occur is to write standards compliant code. Working around bugs or quirks in a specific browser I think falls into the realm of business case.
"Works in WebKit" isn't necessarily equated to "write standards compliant code". For organisations that manage to develop a website that requires a $100,000 outlay to work in Internet Explorer, that can't possibly be a web standards compliant code base they are starting from.
Webkit rendering is not the web, true. That's sad though. I'd rather it WAS the web, and we could go on and improve on it (new image apis, sound apis, acceleration, etc), instead of reinventing various variations of the wheel (ie. basic html rendering).
As for Opera, should they support any oddball browser engine out there with it's particular quirks?
The sites generated by 4ormat support IE so our user's customers can definitely see their work in every browser. It's the app itself which you can't use in IE which is the overwhelming majority of our development.
I went through the exact same process 2 months ago trying to set up payroll. In general, Canadians get some pretty horrible value out of any small/medium business service.
I was going to go with Ceridian but their web app doesn't support Mac. Because we're still small enough, I actually just rigged it up myself in Xero and then just have to use the nastiest 90s era website from my bank. That at least saved me the step of massaging exported data into Xero.
I had been meaning to do this for so long and never did because I preferred Gmail over any native app that was available.
Luckily I tried Sparrow (http://sparrowmailapp.com) about 2 months ago and never looked back. I think the initial download of my "All Mail" folder took 12+ hours but I can rest assure I have a backup of my email on my hard drive and my backup hard drive (for which SuperDuper is awesome: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper).
I find it pretty obnoxious that someone leaked this. This is classic "ruining it for everyone".
That app, when I worked at Amazon, was open to any employee. It would totally suck if they had to restrict access because of some idiot. I always thought it was pretty awesome that I could randomly query all sorts of data at Amazon.
If they're selling a Kindle at the rate of almost one a second, then the stock levels should act as a timestamp. I wonder if Amazon log employee access to report pages.
Considering how tight-lipped Amazon is about everything (including the fact that they've never divulged the number of Kindles sold) I'd imagine Jeff Bezos and Tom Szkutak might be less than happy.
Possibly they should be, this time, as the leaker has just given me (and every other Android developer) 2.5 million very good reasons to bother putting my app into the Amazon App store.
That's the Kindle development thing. It seems to be a black hole. Perhaps because it's based on some kind of bastardized J2ME tech, from what I understand, whereas the Fire is just Android, so you probably won't need that much special stuff to develop for it.
Perhaps. But don't you think they can put out a press release that would be covered by every major newspaper, online and offline? Or Bezos could give an interview with the WSJ, NYT, or anyone he chooses. Why would they leak it CultofAndroid.com, a second or third tier niche tech blog?
I usually don't go for the conspiracy theory. But my first thought after reading the stuff about the Fire was that I should probably get in my order for a second one soon if I want it to show up before the holidays.
Although leaking the other Kindle data doesn't seem as convenient.
1. We accidentally turned off our main Intercom in-trial campaign for a segment of users during an AB test and were surprised how much lower the conversion was. We re-ran the test ensuring both sides had our Intercom in-trial campaign on. It increased in-trial conversion by 25%.
2. We do pay a lot for Intercom (10 person support team, tens of thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of leads) but we also use it a god damn ton for new customer campaigns, activation, churn prevention, reactivation, etc and by in-app, email, and mobile notifications. Replacing all of this would not be cheap.
3. Intercom can definitely be a crutch for bad UX. But you'll only know of those problems if you're actually getting this feedback. It's then on you to have the internal process for addressing common questions or requests in order to reduce the volume of help requests for specific topics.