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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

This looks interesting. I guess they're going through all of this trouble in "digital credit checking" because they don't assume everyone has a credit card?

There's probably a market for a very low friction payment system for high margin goods (e.g. virtual goods, or subscriptions), similar to just doing net terms, for individuals, online. Something where as long as you can guarantee an individual only has one account, you're willing to extend a certain amount of credit per user (not per transaction).

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Even assuming everyone has a credit card, entering a credit card on a mobile phone is enough friction to cause the potential consumer to postpone or never make the purchase. It seems like Affirm would solve that problem.

I'd rather just put my amex into my iphone once (oh, wait, done already) and let Apple handle it. It would probably work IFF Apple and Android/Google both have a relatively compatible solution (from the merchant perspective).

What do you mean by "put my Amex into my phone once...and let apple handle it"? Is this a component of Passbook or something?

I mean in iTunes, and just buy stuff via iTunes. There are obviously many serious problems with that. (Apple's policies, 30% cut, etc.)

In practice what I do is just buy things from Amazon, whether it is on my phone or laptop, so the critical thing is being logged in to amazon.com.

Teens are an example of a group that has mobile phones and doesn't have credit cards (or bank debit cards) and there are other examples. There is also a group that has bank cards, secured credit cards (i.e., requires up-front payment), but doesn't have any means of credit/lay-away-payment available to them that is as easy as a credit card.

Plenty of CPA ads relied on users clicking through to make a purchase using their phone (being billed for what they've purchased). Finding a way to make this purchasing scheme more legitimate (explicitly warn the users that, yes, they will have to pay one way or another) would be the next logical step.

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