I think what is different though is they don't know what you're buying (I think).

Or it's accessible for those who operate without banks. I think there is a term for it, "unbanked" or something like that... there's some decent chunk of the population that doesn't have a bank account / can't get a credit card / etc.

Not sure why that would be any different than credit card payments, which don't itemize every purchase either - they still know how much and to what seller, tracking a seller and banning them seems just as easy.

What they don't get is the buyer's information.

...except for the time and place, with a device that almost certainly has cameras for theft deterrence. Which might be fine now, but seems pretty law-enforcement-capturable.

CC certainly has the capability for extremely granular and personal details. For now, this is usually restricted to hotel stays and airline trips. But the tech exists to encode quite a bit of information about both sides of a transaction and its nature.

>> But the tech exists to encode quite a bit of information about both sides of a transaction and its nature.

Which has monetary value and thus will be monetized, sooner or later.

CC's do get transaction information.

Check out "Level 3 data"

https://www.tidalcommerce.com/learn/what-is-level-3-data

As someone who has implemented code revolving around Level 3 data, the information provided is often of incredibly low quality.

Many shopping carts don't bother sending the data, because they'd rather say "let's support 900 obscure payment platforms in a de-minimis way" than "let's support a handful WELL"

Then there's actually getting the right information into the message to the processor. There's vague and inconsistent documentation on how to tag things like "commodity codes" and data formatting (Should the per-unit price be rendered as $12.79 or $12.7903?)

Even if you have the right intentions, you can easily blow things up by just having out-of-bounds data-- encoding a nonsense discount or tax rate.

What happens is that people set up software that sets up bare-minimum and mediocre data for every order that's good enough to get the "you sent level 3 data" rates, and the actual visibility is still quite poor.

Maybe there are some top-tier merchants who actually do everything right, but there's a hell of a lot of noise amid the signal.

I've done payments too, and I agree. But I'm assuming all the major retailers in the USA (Target/Walmart/Supermarkets) all do this. (And probably more with the data from the register not going through the CC machine).

Absent any information, I just assumed that any supermarket that can handle EBT/SNAP etc was sending transaction details anyway -- the computer will refuse or only partially pay the transaction if any items not elegible for benifits is on the order.

It's more expensive to know.

But this is a remote transaction - no matter the form of currency, an intermediary would be required.

If they have the account number. Ideally you would only need a bank account with any bank for this to work. That would allow anyone to receive payment this way.