Comment by pbourke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbourke | Hacker News Reader

We’ve been ordering from one of the best fine dining restaurants in our town. Before the pandemic they were dine-in only.

They advertise their regular menu + specials on FB. To order, you send a text in the afternoon with your order + pickup time between 5pm and 8pm, in 15 minute blocks. The restaurant calls you a few minutes later to confirm and take your card.

This is a clunky process, but that’s fine - they’re new at this, and I’d rather them get the max amount of the sale than have fees drained by third-party apps.

But it occurs to me that we’ve missed an opportunity in North America (and maybe elsewhere?) to build a platform that works like WeChat, where you could conduct this simple menu-selections-payment transaction, perhaps with some chat in between, using a ubiquitous interface.

Same scenario with booking a hair appointment, paying for small home services, etc. There is an interaction that includes chat, scheduling, possibly invoicing and payment, but this can involve up to one app per activity.

The channel is the unifying abstraction, it should own the entire interaction, including presenting the few widgets that are required to implement the workflow. I know that most chat apps have some variant of this capability, but the landscape is totally balkanized.

A corollary of this approach is that payment and workflow widgets should be commodified and thus extract a minimal amount from the transaction.

We have many apps per category, each with a special-purpose channel. We should have one channel with many possible simple interactions that can be delivered through it.

I don't understand it -- it is amazingly cheap (under $500/year, including hosting and support) and simple to get a great looking online store using a website builder app, including payments (OK, maybe not delivery pickup times, those would still have to go over the phone).

I can see a mom & pop store having some trouble doing that (but even they probably know a high schooler who could do it in a day). I wouldn't expect a serious fine dining restaurant to have trouble with something that basic, especially when takeout just became their only business.

I don’t think this opportunity is missed it’ll just come late. I believe the major platforms Google and Apple will do this by leveraging their payment solutions and app platforms. It’s just a matter of tying together the pieces like messaging into this. It’s mostly there. They have lots of products to surface this as well (maps, os, etc)

I saw that you had similar thoughts in your comment.

I think the challenge is that the capability needs to work seamlessly across the Google and Apple platforms, without becoming chat app n+1.

I don’t know the history of WeChat - curious how it became so ubiquitous.

Enforced government monopoly, more or less.

Also:

> The restaurant calls you a few minutes later to confirm and take your card.

This is really bad, and one of the reasons. For example, I would use Apple Pay only on platforms I don't trust, and giving a card/cvv over the phone is 10000% one of them.

Does it? I could just see two major platforms connecting business to their customers. I believe it’s similar in China. There is Alipay, Wechat and one more

Take your card? By phone? Isn't that one of the problem. I don't want to give my cc details over phone. 3rd party app does provide some value and that's why they are in business. They also provide an infrastructure for delivery which people keep forgetting about.

Yeah I’m not calling this out as the ideal system - it’s the system of a restaurant that had to start doing takeout overnight in order to survive. That being said, I would be interested in the number of “card over the phone” transactions that still happen. I bet it’s huge.

The main point is that there is an opportunity to unify this experience over a ubiquitous channel that would include seamless menu, schedule and payment steps.

That (“card by phone”) is a problem of trust. Whatever happened to that concept? I’ve given away my CC details probably hundreds of times in the pre-internet era (travel agencies, hotels, phone-order, etc.), because I had the details of and trust for the opposite end. That trust is increased through a platform provider is a fallacy imo. The only two times I experienced dodgy charges to my CC that needed refund were because of database leaks/breaches. Go figure ;)

Surely you recognize that this is anecdotal evidence, though? Are you suggesting that people are less likely to experience CC fraud if they give out their information to each vendor instead of using a central mediator like PayPal? The reason we used to give that information out so readily in the past was a combination of not knowing better and not having better methods, and it allowed for a lot of low-level financial crime, despite the fact that you were lucky enough not to experience it yourself.

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