I used to work in Payments at Amazon and I don't think people have an appreciation for how complicated and expensive payments in Europe can be. Credit Card penetration in certain countries (Germany and Switzerland for example) is really low and to get competitive rates you'll need a processor in the UK, France, and Germany. Then, when you have a problem, I challenge you to get technical support from a French bank after 5pm and, while you're at it, make sure you have someone on your team that speaks French.
Credit card penetration is really low so your other options are bank transfers and CVS (paying at a convenience store). COD is actually quite popular but I can't imagine any SaaS could implement that effectively.
I don't have any experience with direct bank transfer systems in Japan. I believe that a lot of Japanese Banks now offer NetBanking as a payment option for CVS payments but I'm not sure how widespread the use is. I'm also not sure what is culturally common in Japan for billing recurring online services.
Perhaps someone on HN who lives in Japan could comment.
Not sure who you're using as a gateway but I do have memories of being on the line with technical support and a Japanese translator.
I have paid through bank transfers a lot in Japan. Instead of just needing a name and an account number, additionally you need to know name of receiving bank and the branch of that bank the recipient uses.
Looking at the last two payments I made, it seems reference codes are not used. How the businesses know which order a payment relates to is a bit mysterious to me. I suppose someone looks at the accounts and tries to match by sender name and date.
No, really I'd rather hear. We're about to launch a product in Japan and all the advice I've been given from folks in Japan so far is that my standard credit card payment processing will be fine for our target user base. So, seeing a comment like the one in the parent post definitely caught my attention. If I'm going to be missing the mark, I'd rather find out now.
I'll second my vote for DNSimple. We were using GoDaddy before and we had an issue where they were returning faulty DNS records from certain hosts (which was such a pain to diagnose). After trying to deal with support at GoDaddy we were done.
We switched everything over to DNSimple and I'm happy paying them $3/month so I never have to look at another GoDaddy config/upsell screen again. They also have a status page (powered by Pingdom) http://status.dnsimple.com.
I've never thought about this before but it actually makes a lot of sense. I can think of countless times that I've highlighted a piece of text while reading an article in a browser just to use as a bookmark while scrolling around.
Thanks for all the responses on this thread. I've found it incredibly interesting.
I'd also highly recommend Thinking With Type. It's a very quick read (as most of the book is visual) and gives you a great foundation for understanding and designing with typography.
There's also one choice moment before this point where a developer is asking what Apple can do about getting beat up in the press and the stockmarket.
For emphasis, in December of 1997 AAPL hit an 11-year low of $3.53 (split adjusted). Today, mainstream media eats out of Steve Jobs' hand and their stock price is, as I type this, $332.
Yes, it was. It discusses Jack's habits, Jack's preference in suits (Prada, practically an advertisment for them), Jack's preference in wristwatches (Rolex), Jack's ideas, Jack's relationships, Jack's friends, et. al.
It discusses Jack's Nouveau riche tendencies - Oh look i'm rich, let me show it off and pretend to be sophisticated. Does he really admire the quality of a Prada suit or a rolex watch? Very very doubtful, those even slightly in the know despise cheap fashion like Prada.
I want his PR rep's number though, they are masters. If Jack is his own PR, kudos to him.
I love how this article is speculating on what crazy things Amazon must be building by adding that many people. I'll tell you what they're building: fulfillment centers and call centers.
About 5 years ago when Amazon had around 15K employees worldwide and they only had 3K in Seattle and only a few small dev centers around the world. So even if every single person in Seattle was working on development that still only accounts for 20% of the workforce.
I can't find up to date numbers on the number of people in each location but considering there's now 40 FCs worldwide I don't think my math can be that far off. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Locations)
If I had to bet, I'd say 2000 of 11000 new employees are either developers, dev managers, or project managers.
It might also be worth asking when the headcount for Zappos got tacked onto Amazon.com.
They are supposedly adding 9 new fulfillment centers this year after adding 11 or 12 last year to meet demand. They had over 50 fulfillment centers at the end of 2010. Thats most likely the source for the majority of their new hires.
1,900 were hired in Seattle alone. I saw that recently on /r/Seattle. Considering their orders are reported to be 40% year over year, 15k - 3k IT staff = 12k x 1.4 ^ 5 is 65k. They only have half that staff total so their efficiency and scaling improvements in distribution means they have to higher less people year over year for warehouse staff.
This is all uninformed speculation. The only public number I've seen is 1,900 hired in Seattle over a 3 month period. That means a lot more than 2k were probably hired for development, which means that Amazon is definitely up to something.
1,900 in Seattle in a 3-month span is a huge number. Knowing that, perhaps they are spending an insane amount of developer time just interviewing more developers.
There's also a forward fulfillment center in Bellevue which might count as Seattle headcount.
If you liked Maverick, you should definitely check out Seven Day Weekend by Semler. I found it much more readable and relevant. It's crazy that it's out of print in the era of the Kindle
At least it's better than Japan though.