The small print is scary, at least compared to a service like PayPal. There's absolutely no consumer protection unless you're actually buying something from Facebook themselves, and for any kind of returns or refunds the advice given is "contact your bank".
Yikes.
> Facebook Pay is an easy, secure way to pay in more places than ever
Amazing! I love paying!
I've been waiting for this for 3 years.
After using Instagram a bunch, I found the targeted ads got pretty good: most were for things I was interested in, such as tech gadgets or crafts for my kids. However, clicking on an ad and buying something was so much higher friction than the rest of the mobile Instagram experience that I often just gave up.
Since then, I assumed FB must be working on some sort of payment service in order to complete the loop on the ad->purchase funnel.
The company, which hasn't been able to figure out the UI hell of the core product for more than a decade now must never be trusted with processing payments.
Especially when you know where the data will end up, what will happen to it next and how the company makes money (98.5% from targeted ads)
I guess they've reached Google-levels of product management when their payment system used across 4 products is named after only one of them. Another Hangouts in the making.
WOW. Available in Pakistan, while Stripe is yet to enter and PayPal gave up.
India is not in the list. But whatsapp payments are already available in India. So is Facebook pay something very different from whatsapp pay ?
It's confusing since the page says "Facebook Pay is a seamless, secure way to pay on the apps you already use". And whatsapp is listed as one app.
Maybe it's entirely different from UPI based Whatsapp pay
Why not Meta Pay? Applies to all the apps, sounds shmancier.
Not that I want to help this company.
Does Facebook, as a product, even has userbase for this?
I find it weird that they used this branding. For some time now, FB has the "old people social media" label. Also would they create a new brand (or MetaPay or whatever), some people might not connect it to Zuck's trash mentality, morality and overall creepiness.
I wouldn't be surprised if folks working at Meta consider themselves the good guys, like Google cultists do. But I was under the impression that FB->Meta name change was due to public's completely trashed opinion on Facebook.
This should have happened for a long time. Facebook's properties are the places where my friends naturally ask for money from me to help. Even with all the negativity I see here in other comments, this is the natural way for Facebook to grow, not trying to compete with the Federal Reserve.
Off topic, but I really hate this trend of using animate-in transitions for _every_ _single_ _section_ of the page. Why I do always have to scroll into a half a window's worth of blank background before the content appears with some cutesy slide-in animation? I could perhaps forgive it if it was just badly implemented lazy-loading images but it also does this for simple section titles and body text as well. It ends up taking twice the time to read since you have to keep waiting for text to appear. It also looks quite bizarre if you refresh the page while scrolled to the bottom and then scroll back up.
To be clear, this is not a complaint about tying dynamic effects to scroll position. Apple does those all the time [0][1][2] but at least you will never have a big gap of blank content at the bottom of the page, usually there is fresh content continously immediately visible as you are scrolling. I don't even mind if there is a bit of initial page-loading animation at the start, as long as it's just once.
Does anyone really prefer reading pages like this? It just seems very disrespectful of the user's time, forcing them to continuously wait just to read your promotional copy.
0: https://www.apple.com/iphone-13-pro/
I wonder how they're doing this in AU, can't see any info about APRA registration as an ADI/ERS user...
Apropos of nothing, I find it hilarious to see how much diversity has been crammed into this ad page. The hero image is a multiethnic androgynous sk8r and I see one mostly occluded white-presenting person among the 7 photographs.
Facebook Pay is literally just Messenger Pay which (later Libra co-founder) David Marcus put into place in 2015, and which approximately no bugger used.
(I mean, there are some users - including comments on this page - and they like it. But it never took off.)
They rebranded it as Facebook Pay in late 2019. Morning Brew said at the time: "If Libra is the Thanksgiving turkey you tried deep frying but caught on fire, Facebook Pay is the backup rotisserie chicken."
But it's not actually a payment system. It's just a Facebook-y front end, but the actual payments are handled by Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or your bank.
I believe Facebook Pay is part of the WhatsApp Pay trial in Brazil - though that uses the local PIX fast payment system to reach the bank/credit-card backends.
It's not clear why this is hitting HN again. But Facebook Pay is a thing that a few people use, and which basically hasn't been killed yet 'cos Facebook really wants to get into payments, somehow.
This will be massive in Europe for WhatsApp. Just went on a ski trip with people from a number of European countries. All use WhatsApp but we didn’t have a single app to send money to each other. PayPal was the only option but most people didn’t have that so we used cash.
Another payment app. Great.
Seems like a smart move seeing as the marketplace feature on FB is actually great.
I thought they had this for years. Not sure why it’s on HN today? Is there something new they launched in payments?
I do use Facebook for donations as our nonprofit get 100% of the donated amount, i.e. Facebook eats the fees, and that's great. But I would never use a payment system from Facebook given the lack of customer support, crazy bans (locking you out of pages, which have nothing to do with your personal profile). They forced me to violate their own rules and create a fake account, which I use to manage my pages if they decide to temporarily ban me - until one day they decide the ban to be permanent!
Interestingly India is not on the list. While one can use UPI to make payments via WA, their market share is less than a percentage.
Having said that,I hope this takes off. All of my friends prefer Instagram as our primary messaging app since it takes a username and not a phone number to text someone. It would be helpful, if we could makes payments there.
The "I would never trust fb with my purchases" crowd are not included in the target audience. Hearing them say they wouldn't use it is redundant.
This is a killer product, it is just 3 years too late. I have no idea why this took so long. It has potential, but will it succeed? Hard to tell, they have lots of competition
Anyone else finding that clicking on this link overrides their browser's "back" button? It's just grayed out after clicking on the link. Might well be browser-specifc - I'm on Firefox.
I'm skeptical FB is so sketchy as to do this intentionally, but I've also never seen this behavior before.
It seems to be using normal debit / credit card payments behind the scenes, so it’s not going to eat the banks’ lunch too much just yet. What would be really good is if they could do A2A payments and circumvent the Mastercard / Visa merchant payment rails and fees. That could be a game changer.
Why would anybody want this versus existing alternatives? OK, the USP of sending money to your Facebook friends... well, if they're my friends, we've been sending money to each other for years when splitting bills etc. It's a solved problem.
From a quick Google search, Facebook pay was launched in 2019. Has anything changed?
I want friction when I pay for things. Why make it easier for others to get my money?
It's surprise me how in the US and other countries there isn't any movement like Bizum in Spain, which you can pay in stores and give or receive money with other people only interchanging a phone number linked with a bank account.
That service is maintained with practically all banks in the country, valid to use with any other person who also have an account, doesn't have any transaction or a monthly/periodical fee, can't roll back payments easily if you screw up, and some other advantages.
> For extra security, set up a PIN, face ID or fingerprint to confirm a payment at checkout.
This doesn’t sound appealing to me. They’re surely storing this biometric data on a server somewhere, right? I use FaceID or my Apple Watch to pay with ApplePay all the time but my biometrics never leave my device.
I don’t follow Facebook all that closely (never used any of its services). Do they have other services that use (require?) face or fingerprint identification? Or is Facebook Pay a sly way for them to start harvesting this data?
I think this will be successful on Instagram because there is a TON of e-commerce happing on Instagram with awkward mechanics like linking to an Etsy or Shopify store in the image caption. If a vendor like this: https://www.instagram.com/summergirldesigns could just allow "Add to Cart" for each of her items, it would probably result in more sales.
Availability shows Afghanistan. How did they get approval for that? Does it mean mums on Facebook can now financially support Taliban and other groups?
I read the entire article, but they don’t mention the details of how they’re going to make all your purchase history available to advertisers, and how they’re going to use this to track you around the internet even better to spam you with more ads of things you just bought. Maybe I just missed these details though…
Under the UK varient of the Facebook Pay site, the Instagram advert has the incorrect decimal separater: using the comma used with Euro's and not the dot/period.
ÂŁ16,50
UK uses commas, but only to separate by thousounds. This makes ÂŁ16,50 seem like it was going to be ÂŁ16,500 instead.
I couldn’t find info if it will support cross country payments to _any_ supporter country.
Being able to send and receive money to and from friends and family without fees and using real exchange rates could potentially be the only reason to sign in to Facebook.
How does this work? Is it a wallet app? Does it act as an interface to your bank's payment network? The kind of vague useless "explanation"[1] getting parroted in the "How it works" page is something I haven't seen anyone do for a long time. If you don't want to tell your consumers clearly, why even bother with such bullshit?
[1]: Facebook Pay is a seamless and secure way to make payments on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Enter your payment card or account information once and then use Facebook Pay to make purchases, send money or donate within the apps. A PIN or biometrics can be added to secure individual payments. Facebook Pay is also a way to view payment history, manage payment information and access customer support. Facebook Pay is currently rolling out in select countries.
Why can’t crypto be like that?
Centralized Social networks like Faceboon and WhatsApp can roll out a payment system nearly overnight and have it accepted at millions of merchants. Crypto after 10 years is hardly accepted anywhere…
So,... NotMetaPay?
Seems like this is 3 years behind everyone else... Which is a bigger issue than the branding itself. I couldn't find one aspect that made it have a competitive advantage over already established brands.
Judging by the short video at the top - is this service aimed only at women?
Send money to friends is definitely a feature that facebook should have implemented early. Now it feels very late in that “pay” game. It makes them look like the google+ of payments.
On firefox, clicking this link loads the page and somehow disables the back button to get back to HN. It does not load in a new tab. Anyone else have this experience?
Facebook should have dominated the payments space. It failed. Every few years they announce new payments products and strategy. Nothing fundamentally changes.
So this is not a payment/purchase option on Facebook but they want to be Apple Pay? I mean do they want me to support it in my app for example?
I wonder if this relates to the huge earnings miss.
Thanks but no. Facebook and Instagram are already deleted on my phone. WhatsApp soon to follow
India is not in the list. But whatsapp payments are already available in India. So is Facebook pay something very different from whatsapp pay ?
It's confusing since the page says "Facebook Pay is a seamless, secure way to pay on the apps you already use". And whatsapp is listed as one app.
Maybe it's entirely different from UPI based Whatsapp pay.
Why isn't it pay.meta.com?
took them long enough. How does this work within apple's walled garden, is apple entitled to a cut? I thought they could use their reach to get people to sidestet apple's requirements.
Should have bought fast.co
I like how they didn't call it Meta Pay.
Does anyone care about Facebook anymore?
So it is not MetaPay?
Hell no
NO.
this service is just another data harvesting operation. avoid like the plague
undefined
undefined
undefined
I am very genuinely curious about whether we disagree on the "Facebook is a bad company" part or not.
And if you think FB is not a bad company. Can the below examples convince you?
If the below examples cannot convince you. Where do you disagree and where do you think I am wrong?
I know this could be way too real for some folks to answer. Especially for folks who use FB for a living (marketing etc) and for FB employees. So hopefully I can encourage some genuine conversations. :)
[1] - How toxic instagram is for teens - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/14/facebook-documents-show-how-...
[2] - I have blood on my hands - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...
[3] - Facebook knew about Russian interference in 2016 US election - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7749740/facebook-knew-russian-...
[4] - Facebook Shadow tracking through FB SDK - https://www.privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/201...
[5] - Cambridge analytica scandal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
[6] - Facebook misled EU about Whatsapp acquisition - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/facebook-fined-e...
[7] Mark lied to Congress (This is the only case I am not sure about AFAIK. So correct me if possible please) - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/390530-dem-lawmaker-sa...
Update: Just got my first down voter. It would be great if whoever down voted could say why. Thanks.
I can’t think of another company I’d want less to know my transaction and purchase history than FB/Meta. What happened to Zuckerberg’s shift to “video” or are they truly throwing anything and everything at the wall now?