

Ask HN: good/bad experiences with Facebook Credits? - fomojola

Its been more than 6 months since Facebook Credits were launched: does anyone have good or bad experiences with user adoption/integration/payouts from Facebook Credits that they could share. Been thinking about possible integration with Facebook Credits and wanted to get a general sense of how well/poorly they work.
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noahth
The rules around Credits, virtual currency, and the platform in general are
still changing and it seems sometimes that Facebook is still learning what it
needs to do to run a serious and dependable payments system.

Until very recently, Credits have not really been supported beyond the level
of an experiment. That's starting to change, but a lot of functionality and
support is still missing. The phase-out of free promotional credits (for which
developers were not paid), which was originally slated to occur on February
15th, is ongoing. A functional reporting and management interface for Credits
partners would be very welcome - currently this consists of an incomplete API
and two .tsv files (a detailed list and a digest of transactions for the
previous day) automatically emailed to publishers nightly. These emails
started being sent about six weeks ago. There is currently no mechanism for
responding to disputed payments or fraud claims but they say they're working
on it.

There are positive aspects to Credits though. We see decent adoption but still
process many more transactions and many more dollars (at a much lower fee,
it's worth reiterating!) through Paypal. The checkout flow is pretty good, and
while some people are less trusting of Facebook, some already regard them as a
trustworthy steward of CC info, and the latter group is probably more closely
aligned with target audiences than the former.

I'd say that right now (and at least until off-site, FB Connect
implementations of Credits has been in use for months), it's a question of
whether your project requires the other benefits of building on Facebook -
user data, social hooks, etc - to the extent that it's worth swallowing the
fee & quirks of the platform. Then again, isn't that true of projects built on
any proprietary platform, especially one that's still maturing?

~~~
ignifero
Agreed on all. They need to do better work. We 've been much more satisfied
with our previous currency processor. Right now, with the facebook credits
option in the same page as other alternatives, 40% of our users prefer to pay
through facebook credits. When we first set it up, their documentation
contained errors and omissions. They also need to work on a plug-and-play
iframe option, like other payment processors do. Those issues aside, the
payment flow is very smooth and frictionless on the user's side.

Their developer support is horrible. We receive a daily digest with 2 tab
separated reports in a zip file, and that's all. Up until recently we weren't
even notified that we are getting paid. Once, we tried to contact them about
their billing information, and they gave us the wrong answer (which resulted
in us paying a penalty to the tax office). I am tending to think they are also
understaffed in that department.

We will succumb to facebook's exclusivity request because our app is tied on
the canvas, however we are not feeling we are getting our money's worth out of
the 30% cut.

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patio11
Can I give you my end-user perspective? The buyer experience was
_ridiculously_ slick, particularly on my second transaction. I didn't feel
like I was spending money at all. No retyping address/card, no password
prompt, just pick dollar amount and hit OK.

It's like what Paypal would feel like if Paypal wasn't a web 1.0 company. (For
example, FB is _fast_ \-- Google fast -- and Paypal is _slow_. I'm inclined to
believe PP does the auth in the request/response cycle and FB reports insta-
success and deals with problems later.)

