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Comment by FreakyT | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting feature, but it seems unlikely that enough people will add their card information to Facebook to make it worthwhile, considering that both the payor and payee need CC information included for the payment to work.

On a related note, this continues Facebook's unfortunate user-interface decision to replace the simple "send" button in Facebook Messenger with a row of increasingly crowded and not-particularly-useful buttons to send various "other" things.

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After a week or so for people to adopt it send out $1 gifts to 100,000 (or however many that will represent a rounding error in dollars) people with accounts meeting some set of activity requirements, who have not yet signed up. They then have to enter their info to claim it, once their info is entered they have no barrier to use it and may send money to others further spreading it.

Also publicize that you will be giving like $1,000 to 100 lucky fb pay users who have performed at least 5 transactions, after 2 months of fb pay.

I mean Facebook just needs to get a decent initial seed of people to add their info, and for it to be so painfully stupidly easy that every relative on Facebook can now send their nephews/nieces and grand children those $5 birthday gifts so that it spreads.

Plus Facebook can mine the FB social graph to figure out which people to incentivize with gift payments, to maximize viral spreading.

You only need to convince the payer. The recipient gets an email that says "You have money waiting, let us give it to you."

No, they then tell the payer, pay me with this instead, I don't want to sign up for this. The usual use case is giving money back for restaurants and such, so you have the social closeness to do this.

FB is in a unique situation where they can convert at a pretty high rate.

Seems to work pretty well for PayPal.

The Payee will be reasonably motivated to add their CC to retrieve the funds.

Like the thumbs up? Why is that the DEFAULT button there?

It turns into the send button as soon as you start typing

Why is it unlikely that enough people will add their card information to Facebook?

I'm curious, too. Given that they have hundreds of millions of users and most (that I know) don't seem to care one way or the other about the privacy implications, I don't see usage being an issue at all.

I've never really been on FB that much, so this may be fueled by that.. but i would hate adding my CC info to FB. Generally speaking i am very loose with my CC.. i don't worry about it too much, and give it out often. With that said though, FB (to an outsider) has had a history of sketchy FB apps doing sketchy shit with your data/feed/etc. This has seemed to install a distrust of FB and the FB-app ecosystem in me.

Not sure if that's common or not, and i'm sure i'm in the minority, but nevertheless i figure it's a valid thought. To be clear, i'm not saying that they shouldn't be trusted, i'm saying that to a FB-ignorant person, i'm not too trusting of them.

Note: This has nothing to do with anti FB/"FB data" type of people.

Agreed, the network effect works seriously in FB's favour here. Do I add my payment details and get back the £20 an acquaintance sent me or do I wait until I see them and hope we both remember?

Once you're signed up then FB have dropped the barrier to making further payments with their platform, which presumably is the purpose of this from their point of view.

It's not that people won't eventually add their debit card

Your payee has to a) have the FB app installed, b) have a debit card, c) from a US-based bank and d) agree to add that debit card to the FB app.

It's more than just "pay on FB". Enough little hurdles to present immediate adoption friction. Many people know that you can do chargebacks on CCs but can't do that for debit cards so they have reservations about adding that debit card to online transactions (never mind that FB Pay is likely just using ACH in the background).

They already made a lot of transactions before so they already own a lot of credit card info already:

* gifts

* promote personal posts on news feed

* ads (promote page posts)

* some messages (you had to pay to send a message to mark for example)

* people who enter it just so they can recover their password more easily

Square Cash and Venmo are quite popular. I wouldn't be so sure.

What's your definition of popular?

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