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Comment by namanaggarwal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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