Now that I work for a big evil corporation, I have some insights on why these inexplicably evil things happen. Fun at parties, I know. Not excusing it, just shedding light for anyone interested in the systems perspective.
>It appears as though charges from Apple are special
This is exactly right. You offer branded cards because interchange fees are expensive. You want people who buy your stuff to pay you by ACH. That's not practical at the point of sale, but it is practical if you frame it as the monthly payment on your store-brand credit card. Charges at the store on the store-brand card are always special. That's why the cards are offered.
From a merchant's perspective, anyone who buys something is really taking out a loan. In most cases such a loan will be settled by the customer's card issuer, less the interchange fee. In the case of a branded card, it will be settled by the customer directly and in full. In either case, if this doesn't happen on time, the customer's account with the merchant is now in arrears.
Most of the time this happens, the "customer" is farming stolen credit card numbers for resalable goods. You are never going to find these people, let alone rehabilitate them and settle up. So the "hey, you did a lot of chargebacks to us, what the hell?" state is not user friendly. It's scorched earth. I would be cautious about signing into any other Apple accounts on devices that have been associated with yours.
I think part of the reason people end up in these situations is because they don't think about things from the systems perspective. And in most cases, they don't need to, so long as everything stays on the happy path. But I think knowing the general nature and structure of a system, whom it ultimately serves and why can help one avoid situations where things will go sideways, or if they do, give one a better chance at remedying things.
Agreed, people don't, because historically they haven't had to. Who would think that their computer's software update mechanism, streaming music account, calendar sync, and the mechanism that allows them to make phone calls from their computer would all be tied to a credit card account, and if they accidentally missed a payment on that credit card (and not just any payment, but a payment when part of the balance includes a product from the card issuer), they'd lose access to all of those things? It's pretty unprecedented.
It's the same thing that people complain about with Google all the time: do something slightly weird with something related to your Google account, and you lose your email, photos, calendar, documents, chat, mobile payments, etc. all at once. And while this instance with Apple was terrible, at least there was a way -- even if incredibly convoluted -- for an individual to get support and get things fixed. With Google, you have to get enough social media buzz that someone high up enough at Google notices and fixes your problem in order to avoid even more bad PR.
We really need some sort of legislation around indiscriminate account bans and recovery procedures. Too much of people's lives depend on their interactions with Apple's and Google's services. Mistakes can cause so much havoc. It's nearly criminal that this is still happening.
Not only it's unprecedented, but it's constantly developing. Apple Health, Home, and in the future amny others - they all link you to a single account a give another party (that you can't communicate meaningfully with) a complete control over important aspects of your life. Still, we prefer convenience over safety, privacy and control.
>It's the same thing that people complain about with Google all the time: do something slightly weird with something related to your Google account
You don't even need to go outside Apple's ecosystem to find an example. What you just wrote is just as bad with Apple itself. Publish an app, update it many times and suddenly it gets pulled for something that wasn't changed in any recent update (or maybe Apple changed the rules after the fact).
> because they don't think about things from the systems perspective
That's quite a dystopian statement. I don't want to think from the systems perspective.
In fact I want to have the least possible amount of interactions with any system.
Don't buy the "systems" card. Don't listen to all this BS about convenience and cool factor. Who cares. At least banks are regulated and there's a known appeals process.
> You want people who buy your stuff to pay you by ACH. That's not practical at the point of sale, but it is practical if you frame it as the monthly payment on your store-brand credit card.
This is only the case if the store cards are serviced by the company that issues them. You can think of those cards as card like financing done by FingerHut.
Most of the cards are issued by regular financial institutions such as WF, BoA, FirstBank of Omaha (?) that specialize in doing branded cards. The deal there is structured as a simple rebate to the introducing company like Apple gets to slap its logo and issuer rebates/refunds the fees for purchases done at the branded stores to the introducing company. If the introducing company gets a certain pre-determined number of new cards with a certain predetermined combined credit lines, the introducing company gets additional money.
I see little reason to believe that a first party payment method is anything more than a red herring. It seems like Apple Retail has a policy in general to shut down Apple IDs for customers with negative balances, and it just so happened that this negative balance was due to payment issues with a first party card. Others have reported similar outcomes when paying with PayPal.
It’s not. There isn’t enough detail to determine whether the retail part of Apple was able to successfully post a charge for clawing back trade in value but then noticed the underlying account was revolving or whether OP just saw a hold which didn’t go through. If going out of a revolving status was sufficient due to fancy first party integration, why would OP have to email retail to let them know to run the charge again?
In addition, if that was indeed the setup, the email would have to include disclosures about being an attempt to collect debt which they did not. And they would likely need to come from the bank and not Apple Payments Receivables.
Finally, people report the same issue with PayPal.
>It appears as though charges from Apple are special
This is exactly right. You offer branded cards because interchange fees are expensive. You want people who buy your stuff to pay you by ACH. That's not practical at the point of sale, but it is practical if you frame it as the monthly payment on your store-brand credit card. Charges at the store on the store-brand card are always special. That's why the cards are offered.
From a merchant's perspective, anyone who buys something is really taking out a loan. In most cases such a loan will be settled by the customer's card issuer, less the interchange fee. In the case of a branded card, it will be settled by the customer directly and in full. In either case, if this doesn't happen on time, the customer's account with the merchant is now in arrears.
Most of the time this happens, the "customer" is farming stolen credit card numbers for resalable goods. You are never going to find these people, let alone rehabilitate them and settle up. So the "hey, you did a lot of chargebacks to us, what the hell?" state is not user friendly. It's scorched earth. I would be cautious about signing into any other Apple accounts on devices that have been associated with yours.