Push a button, have ten bucks paid, repeat a thousand times

Consider a situation, where a customer pays for something on the Internet. There appears to be a huge perception difference between the client who pays and the provider who collects the payments. The impression that the two sides have on the scale of the affair is completely different.

See, if you are a customer and all you want is to pay $10 for something on the Internet, to you it's a matter of efficiency - through which hoops you have to jump to have it done and how fast you get the stuff you pay for. In an online transaction like that the money themselves don't matter much to a client, for the following reasons -

1. The client thinks of the electronic payment as of the payment with real money, which cannot be mishandled or require any processing which can be delayed or refused;

2. It's actually the merchandise or the service which the client wants at the time. The necessity to pay money, even online, is the mandatory inconvenience, an obstacle to it;

3. The amount of money in question is not that large. Even in the worst case the customer's risk is nearly zero.

I'm not saying a customer will tolerate losing money in an online transaction. What I'm saying is that at the moment of such transaction the client will not worry much about what could happen. To a client, it's all in "push a button, have ten bucks paid, how complicated such a simple procedure could possibly be ?"

And it wouldn't unless there were thousands of customers. When serving a single customer, it's easy to take the money, even manually, over a counter and process the payment, but processing a stream of thousand payments is different. Then you have a different perspective at the same $10.

When you are a provider, the problems that you face all have the same root - that you are a money pipe - anyone can use your services to buy something for themselves. What are the outcomes ?

1. Responsibility before customers. You simply cannot afford to fail. When you fail to deliver, the customers will haunt you, even for the same lousy $10. Dealing with this requires certain investments in reliability of the solution.

2. Freedom to be abused. A strong incentive is presented to the entire world to hack you and profit from that. This asks for security-oriented thinking.

3. Overwhelming complexity. Unlike the customer, you understand the guts of the service, and see the great many places in which any given payment can fail. And you have to maintain it.

See, from the provider's point of view the same ten bucks payment becomes nothing short to a hand grenade.

As it is my primary job to develop such solutions, I'm obviously on the provider's side. And since I'm a software developer, I have one more problem to deal with - the deceitfully simple outside look of the solution, remember - one button, ten bucks... Should the management adopt a customer's view, then for them it's a similar question of "how difficult a development of something that simple could possibly be ?".

But then, indeed, how difficult could it be to develop something that simple ?