This could well be to help prevent sms pumping — where someone makes money by receiving smss to a particular set of numbers. Requiring the user to first send an sms breaks the economics that type of fraud.
221 karma · joined October 19, 2009
Son: Why does the croissant cost €2.80 here while it's only €0.45 in Lidl? Who would buy that?
Me: You're not paying for the croissant, you're paying for the staff to give it to you, for the warm café, for the tables to be cleaned and for the seat to sit on.
Would also like to be able to kick a report off automatically -- eg, on any exception or on any 4XX from the server.
I think this is poor and dangerous advice for anyone who wants to get ahead in life. If you are happy to coast by and not achieve much in life, sure, don’t work hard. But if you want to be one of the few who either rise to the top in your field or to create value in the world, then don’t feel bad about wanting to work hard. People generally learn by doing and those who do a lot learn a lot. Of course, don’t prioritize it over things that are important to you (physical health, family etc) but don’t feel it’s wrong to prioritize it above stuff isn’t important to you (eg Netflix and YouTube shorts).
An opportunity to lead all of engineering in a European break out tech company and Ireland’s 5th unicorn.
I find doing this type of thing (creating nice canned responses, creating reusable answers) nearly always pays off in the medium and long term and find that it’s much easier to put the effort into a response knowing that you’ll get long lived value from it vs it just being useful for one person.
Similarly, I often find others have done similar and if their thoughts align with mine I don’t need to write the answer myself but instead can refer to someone else’s blog post etc.
We initially automatically logged people in silently on Android by detecting their phone number, sending a verification SMS and intercepting it in the app. This was viewed as more spooky than good UX, so we had to reverse course a little and add another manual step in that case. But other little UX niceties remained, like extrapolating the customer’s name from the name of their iPhone (chances are you phone us called “[first name]’s iPhone”) to save them typing it in.
I think it would be quite difficult to manage a production system that lets people pay with cash but not log in, as it would be so easy for a single script kiddy to take all your restaurants offline by placing fake orders over and over.
You would be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how little business owners think about UX. We get so many requests to require a DOB before being allowed placing an order so they can send birthday messages to customers.
A nice summary of the state of affairs by UK comedian Michael McIntyre https://youtu.be/O5FeZti1cjs
This isn’t new either — DPD, UPS, DHL have all offered a shared delivery network (for retail) without anyone expecting that anything that is delivered by DHL must be ordered via DHL.com.
This is an excerpt of a recent article that explains my thinking on it a bit better.
There is little (or even negative) value for restaurants from marketplaces in this industry. In many industries marketplaces like this make sense.
Typically, they make sense when discovery is very important, when there is little repeat usage of the discovered service or when there are multiple disparate services involved.
Travel is a good example here: it makes good sense for a consumer to use a marketplace to discover a hotel and a car rental company when they book a trip to a city they’ve never been to and likely won’t go to again for a few years.
And it makes sense for a hotel to list on a marketplace as it’s impractical for them to market directly to consumers from around the world in the off chance that they will visit the city the hotel is in.
There are very different dynamics at play in hospitality. People tend to order from two or three takeaways in rotation as opposed to discovering a new one each time they order.
They also tend to order from one located physically close to them, and they usually can be efficiently marketed to by this takeaway directly, both via offline methods such as walking past the store each day, getting flyers in the door, and online via search and brand marketing.
It is also rare that a consumer needs to make multiple purchases from separate services to order their food (they don’t, for example, usually need to order a taxi to collect the food after ordering it).
The value that restaurants get from joining a marketplace is the consumer-facing online ordering technology that they get access to, but not from the fact that they are getting it from a marketplace.
There is a lot of negative value for a restaurant in joining a marketplace (i.e., it causes them harm) as they end up sending their existing customer base away to a 3rd party who is incentivised to move the consumers away from that restaurant and over to one who will pay the marketplace more for the orders.
Disclaimer: I’m cofounder of flipdish.com that provides direct ordering tech to restaurants.
Full disclosure - I’m the technical co-founder.
Disclaimer - I’m the bald guy.
Hiring .NET backend developers. REMOTE
All roles at https://www.flipdish.com/careers/
https://www.flipdish.com/careers/
Mention HN in the application and I’ll make sure it’s prioritised.
I’m totally biased, but I think we’ve a great culture and lovely and friendly tech team who love solving problems together and getting stuff shipped.
This blog post shows what happens when restaurants decide to leave portals: https://www.flipdish.com/ie/the-effects-of-leaving-costly-fo...
Can we get webhooks for these? We currently have to manually refund charges when we get the ‘suspicious transaction’ email from stripe, which is a pain.
This would depend on how well stripe can detect fraud.
And if the price is higher to insure individual transactions, that still would be a nice/valuable service to have.