Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone. I've been working on this at Google for a while and would be happy to answer any questions you might have. If you don't want to ask here, feel free to email me at <my username> AT google.com. There might be a delay in responding if I get a lot of messages or if you have a particularly challenging question.

View on HN

My question is: when you send emails like "it has come to our attention... fraudulent activity..." [1] [2] and confiscate $30,000+ earnings by shutting down long-standing AdSense accounts, will you do the same to the entire Gmail accounts, or just to the money transferring functionality?

One would have to be a fool to use this, knowing Google's arrogant heavy-handed history of dealing with AdSense publishers (and an absolute lack of any meaningful customer care): this is why Google Wallet has never taken off as an alternative to PayPal in the first place.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585043

Because Paypal is known as a bastion of neutral dispute resolution rolls eyes

Paypal is terrible, but at least you can get on the phone and talk to someone when things get hairy. Every time I have google support issues I end up waiting days or weeks for automatic replies that don't even address the issue.

Google Apps has great support.

To the sibling post: actually Rackspace has horrible support. They regularly experience downtime and outages and never notify customers or update their status blog. Can you get someone on the phone? Yes. Do they have anything of value to offer you? No. My favorite was when they referred me to their twitter feed, which hadn't (at the time) been posted to in 9 months.

That's not really horrible. Horrible is when AdSense shuts your account with $15k/mo revenue, confiscates $30k earnings already on the account, refuses to tell you why (a template response) and there is absolutely no human you can call and discuss this.

I have to disagree - Google Apps has the absolute worst support of any business application/suite I've ever used.

If Google provides meaningful support for Wallet going forward, I hope they consider extending it to Apps - it's desperately needed.

can you characterize what makes their support "the absolute worst support of any business application/suite I've ever used" with examples?

that is not the general consensus of google apps customers, so i am curious what experiences have caused you to have this opinion.

No - Google Apps have terrible support. Basecamp has great support. Stripe has great support. Rackspace has great support. Google Apps... not.

How does Stripe have great support? I had to wait two days for a reply. The advice I got was very good, but the response time doesn't make for "great" support.

Stripe has amazing support, even proactively reaching out when weird things happen:

Got a 500 error back from their API once and had an email from one of their engineers in my inbox almost immediately after to find out what happened and resolve it (my http lib was using stale DNS).

Hum, maybe I just got unlucky. I'm extremely satisfied with them overall, it's just that the response time could use a bit of improvement.

That depends what the question was.

I've had nothing but excellent (less then 6 hour) response times from Stripe.

I just asked if they would be unhappy with lots of charges and immediate refunds (answer: they would be, it costs them a bit).

Rackspace has great support if your definition of support is taking a ticket and getting back to you in 2-4 hours.

Paypal is actually much better. When you reach about 10k/mo, they give you a special representative from the account management team, with a special phone number, and those guys are quite smart and easily available. First hand knowledge.

I used to manage a Paypal account that did significantly more than that, and nobody ever offered that to me.

Internationally I think it's $50k/mo in revenue...

@raldi: could be also dependent on the number of payments per day. My knowledge is for the account with relatively small, but numerous payments.

As the service is connected to your email and your Google+ accounts, it's possible that Google can determine actual frauds with much more accurately than, for example, Paypal. Google is a data company after all, and I'd be surprised if they don't employ big data techniques to build trust networks and pinpoint frauds.

No one can determine fraud with absolutely no false positives. If there is no way to "appeal", then those false positives (no matter how few) will be thoroughly screwed.

It's very interesting/telling that this question was not answered by jrockway, but those above/below it were.

Let's say I use this to pay for something I've purchased online, and I later realize the seller is a scammer and want to issue a chargeback. Will that be possible? What are your plans for this situation?

If something goes wrong with my account, can my account be locked and my balance frozen? Will it be possible to contact a real human who knows what they're doing to get that fixed?

Yes, you can talk to a real human. Please call us any time you think you're having a problem, the number is 1-855-492-5538.

For details about what we can and can't help with, take a look at this article:

http://support.google.com/wallet/bin/static.py?hl=en&pag...

It's true! I was skeptical so I just called it and got a human after 1 button push and a 10 second wait.

Passed the Turing test, I'll be damned.

OMG, the next step is self-awareness!

Are you certain it was a human? Did you see the speech recognition keynote today? ;-)

Well, that's a good answer. I feel like this is something one can't do for 99% of other google products although I haven't tried it. Is this as rare as I think it is?

You realize that Google does not have the best reputation when it comes to talking to a real human being? Personally, I hope this is where that begins to change.

Nice. Can you send me $1 so I can be accelerated into the beta? :-)

They can get help from a human.

But Google will not issue chargebacks for payments made via "send money with GMail".

So what's the fraud control process? In the above mentioned case, is the official advice just "be careful before you push the button"?

You can dispute a transaction here https://support.google.com/wallet/bin/request.py?hl=en&c...

I had a prepard card setup with Google Wallet when it first came out. Then that card was discontinued by Google. I had $100 loaded onto that card. When I asked Google for a refund (September of 2012), first the form to submit a refund request wasn't working, then I couldn't get a hold of a human to talk to. After doing some googling (maybe 1-2 hours), I found the phone number to call customer service. When I got to talk to a person, they were unaware of the Prepaid card being discontinued. Because of this, they were also unable to give me a refund. Then I called again, seemed like the same person picked up, and I told again to fill in the online request form. Somehow, the second time, the form did work. But it's been way over the allotted time to receive my refund from Prepaid refund, how does Google expect to send money and actually get my rent, deposit, gift, or anything I use Paypal for to not be held up on their servers somewhere?

Hi numbers!

I'm a software engineer at Google and I just wanted to let you know how to get your money back!

I'm sorry if we weren't properly indexed when the card was retired, but as of now searching for 'google wallet prepaid refund' returns the correct link at the top. (With the phone support number on the 'Contact Us' sub-page listed there[1].)

Since we had special support staff for this refund (and Wallet in general), I suspect that the number you found was not the correct one, which would explain the confusion. I've used the Wallet customer support, and have always been impressed, so I'm hoping that really is what happened.

I can't tell you why you haven't received your funds, but the customer support reps at that number are authorized (with your consent) to look up that information and help you out.

Cheers! Doug

[1] http://www.google.com/wallet/prepaid-refund/contact.html

Great! Thanks for the reply and your time! :D I will be giving them a call.

Will this ever allow for international transfers? If so, is there an ETA?

It's odd that it's US only because Google Wallet for Digital Goods has been international for quite some time.

but they will have to support it now.

Is this only Gmail-to-Gmail? or between existing wallet customers?

If you allow any email, then what about man-in-middle attack as the email might go over SMTP/plain text?

Money doesn't actually fit into email, so that's not really an issue. It's all Google Wallet, so the transfer doesn't happen over email itself.

> Money doesn't actually fit into email

Actually.... bitcoin.

No. The only way to 'send' bitcoins in email is sending the keys for the coins you still own; this (of course) is stupid, since you retain control, so it becomes a race to see which one of the people with the keys transfers them to an address they solely own first.

I suspect it is attached to the email symbolically only, and the money is transferred from google account to google account via some other route.

Is there any chance of getting your Gmail account shut down because of suspicious transactions etc with wallet? I understand that with a service like wallet Google will need to shut down accounts that look like they might be fraudulent (even though often it might turn out not to be) but it would be good to have a guarantee that they won't take the Gmail account down with it.

So when will you be integrating with the Bitcoin network?

/obligatory

I just spent the last few minutes trying to figure out how to use this. Why is this in fine print?

>This feature will be rolling out to Gmail users ages 18+ in the U.S. over the next few months

It's not that fine... it's directly under the headline..

Also directly under the line "Google Wallet is now integrated into Gmail", accompanied by screenshots. I wasted time looking for it, too, before coming back and seeing the "* ha ha not really" text.

I want to make use of this sooner rather than later. Is the rollout completely random or determined by some other meaningful factor. Lets say I connect my bank account with Google Wallet now, would that put me in line above someone without a bank account associated with their Google Wallet?

The rollout is such that when you successfully claim money you've been sent, you'll be able to send money from Gmail about 30 minutes after that. (It will be a couple weeks if your account is on an Apps domain and your domain administrator has not opted in to the faster feature release cycle.)

We're sending money to the I/O attendees first, and then they'll be able to send money to their friends, and so on.

We're sending money to the I/O attendees first, and then they'll be able to send money to their friends, and so on.

Wow, that's an amazing way to track social connections among developers. I bet it's really exciting to watch the network spread.

Any idea when this will be available for other countries? Canada? Europe?

thanks!

Canada has had Interac email money transfers for around a decade, without any lock-in to a particular "wallet service" or email host.

This is so late to the market as to be irrelevant.

interac is not free, this is

I'll bet you a shiny nickel that Canadians will still stick with Interac rather than a credit-card based Google Virtual Wallet based solution.

Credit-card based solutions have monumentally failed to gain traction vs interac for ages.

As a counterpoint, I never use Interac for payments precisely because I can use my credit card and get all the benefits that offers: rewards, zero liability, deferred payment, etc. The only place I use debit is at Tim Horton's if I don't have cash as they don't accept Visa.

This looks awesome, but not at all core to Google's core revenue generators (gmail isn't, either, and this is on top of gmail...). Not to be a dick, but how do we know we can trust adopting this? For user to user payments it's not a big deal to switch to/from this, but for anything else, ...

Also, how will Google handle the customer support needs of payments? People get really pissy when their accounts are frozen, transactions delayed, etc. when money is involved. Google historically doesn't have a good track record for "hand holding customer service".

Why do you think that Gmail is not a core product for Google just because it's not the primary revenue generator? Gmail is a very important user identifier, is probably quite critical for personalized ads, has high usage numbers, and most likely* is revenue positive via ads within Gmail. Quite unlike all the shut down projects, won't you say?

*I have no idea, I'm just guessing.

Yeah, you could consider GMail a loss-leader if you'd like. People rely on the email as an essential life service...and -- how nice -- there's some easy-to-use paid features integrated into it.

Just like how gas stations make more money from a cup of coffee than 10 gallons of unleaded.

It probably generates enough revenue to be protected, but it isn't Adwords, search, or Adsense. It is probably less important than android. I'm not sure if it is more or less important than Chrome.

Considering Google Wallet powers their Play store I think it's safe to say they will continue to want to collect money for quite some time...

Not core to their actual revenues but it'll help massivly in knowing who are real users. Easy to automatically fake gmail/google plus accounts that look realistic. An account with real payments going to/from it is likely to be real, and can be tied to all their other services. And obviously when paying for things on youtube (which will become more popular soon) it will be as easy for youtube/gmail users, as it is for iOS users to pay for in app purchases.

Any chance you are working on convincing banks to speed up ACH transfers?

When will we be able to send Bitcoin using this feature?

When will we be able to store Bitcoin in Google Wallet?

You actually use bitcoin?

How can Google Wallet be truly successful if it is only allowed to exist on a (relatively) small subset of mobile devices?

"Google Wallet" is actually the name for most of the payments-related stuff at Google; visit https://wallet.google.com/ for the main interface and http://support.google.com/wallet/?hl=en for various articles explaining what you can do in more detail.

Pay-by-Gmail, which is what we launched today, is actually used through Gmail on your desktop.

Can you withdraw money with Wallet in as many countries as with Paypal, though? That has always been the biggest adoption hurdle, I think. If not, what has taken you guys so long to do it? I want Google Wallet to be a real Paypal competitor, but it doesn't seem to be - or at least it hasn't been until now.

Just a buglet for you to squash.

Clicking 'Learn more' on this page https://wallet.google.com/enroll/ basically opens the same page again, for me.

Not on this topic, but maybe you know someone. From some countries (e.g. Georgia, Europe), why it is delayed to add support for selling the paid apps in the google play market?

I might have missed this in the keynote. However, what was the original drive to provide such a feature inside of gmail. Also will this work on gmail for mobile devices?

When will this support bitcoin?

Is there any Perl code inside by any chance? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com