Archive for February 25th, 2008
I just got an email telling me, among other things, that:
“Making a refund?
Refunds are quick and easy. Learn more”
On the “learn more” page, you get this info:
Hmm . . . seems like an awful lot of steps to me. This is one area where PayPal falls really short. Especially in comparison to a true merchant account or Google Checkout, they make refunds really time consuming. Far, far, from easy.
Saul Hansell has an article in the New York Times blog about Google driving away Postini resellers. Fair point - offer a service to the end-user cheaper than through a middleman, and you get rid of the middleman. It’s the old ‘disintermediation’ that the internet has been know for since the beginning.
I wrote about my switch to Postini earlier. I wouldn’t have done it if Google hadn’t started offering the service directly - partly for cost reasons, and partly because I didn’t need anyone in the middle of my relationship with Google.