> fraud costs

Are you making educated guesses or do you actually know that fraud costs Stripe money?

EDIT - Yep, sorry, Square. I'm just in the middle of integrating with Stripe, so it just slipped.

You mean Square. A little of both. The WSJ reported that their gross margin shrank from 27% to 21% in 2013 and specifically mentioned fraud as a component. (Interchange didn't change much.) [1]

With very easy signup with minimal due diligence, plus next day payout, it's an attractive target for fraudulent sellers. Even with relatively honest but low volume sellers, chargebacks may be hard to collect once the money's paid out, so Square is left holding the bag. With a gross margin of barely more than half a percent of the transaction amount, one bad merchant can erase the revenue from a great many good ones.

Stripe and PayPal face similar issues in the ecommerce world, and you can see how annoying PayPal has had to become to tighten up their fraud controls (lots of bad experiences with funds getting frozen).

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230382560...

Hmm, fraudulent sellers. So you are basically saying that if someone charges a bunch of customers and then disappears, the chargebacks fall on Square's lap? This doesn't sound right. I'd guess that this is acquiring bank's problem and they hedge against this through their fee structure.

Usually the payment processor (square in this case) is responsible for chargeback/fraud costs. The acquiring bank will only end up paying those costs if square goes under and is unable to.

Even if it's passed back to square via fees, square's still paying for it. The fact that their gross margin shrank indicates those costs increased. And we know interchange didn't account for it.

Square, not Stripe. And how could fraud not cost them money? That's a cost of doing business for every payment processor.

Fraud costs them money the same way support costs them money - it's an operational expense. What I don't know if they are also on a receiving end of any penalty fees, especially in cases of fraudulent merchants.

Dealing with fraud costs money (because it costs money to pay people to do it), even if they don't bear the costs of the actual fraud.

>Square is often compared to Apple, but Apple successfully decommodifies products through actual fundamental innovation (phones, MP3 players, PCs).

Disagree 100%. Apple's products are inherently commodities, and their innovations are decidedly only in the PR and marketing spheres. From a technical perspective nothing they do is particularly innovative.

Apple did not invent the mp3 player. Apple built their "seminal" GUI only after Xerox PARC showed them how. Thinkpads have had fingerprint scanners since 2004. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Apple doesn't innovate so much as take someone else's idea and give it a slick marketing campaign and some anodized aluminum casing.

>They make stuff people actually want to pay premiums for.

This part I agree with. But it's because of the slick marketing, not due to some kind of next-level technical wizardry.

It's a complete nonsequitur - are Luis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada/whatever accesories commodities because "from a technical perspective nothing they do is particularly innovative" ?

It doesn't really matter how you make your product not-a-commodity. The market repeatedly shows that it doesn't treat Apple product as commodities, therefore they are not commodities, and they can have very different business fundamentals than, say, Dell or HTC.

And it doesn't matter if the escape of commoditization was achieved by R&D, PR, divine intervention or whatever else; There are many possible ways of differentiating your products; and the market behavior for commodity and non-commodity goods/services is objectively different no matter why your product is/isn't a commodity.

Luis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada accessories are commodities by definition.

From wiki: >In economics, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services.

Are you suggesting that Apple products are not marketable items, thereby being goods? Or that their cloud products are not services?

Are you suggesting that a Luis Vuitton handbag is not a marketable item produced to satisfy consumer wants?

Luis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada accessories strictly are NOT commodities by definition.

"marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs" is a neccessary but not sufficient condition for being called a commodity.

Commodities is a subset of all goods / marketable items - those that have high fungibility and low differentiation. It's not a binary classification, but on "commodity <> not-commodity" scale Luis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada stuff is near the extreme not-commodity end.

Actually, the same wikipedia explains it quite well in the sentences after that first line.

The next sentence is

"The exact definition of the term commodity is specifically used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market."

You're using the wrong definition (and truncating it to boot) for "commodity" here. The key element is the "undifferentiated" element, and, while there's room to debate the true level of differentiation of mass-manufactured products to which a brand label is applied, the point is that what sets Luis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, etc., apart in the marketplace is in fact a perceived differentiation in quality from products not- or differently-branded.

I thought you got unfairly slammed for your Apple comments, but you're really pursuing a barren ground here.

While "fundamental innovation" is a little strong, they are not merely better "decidedly only in the PR and marketing spheres". I'm guessing your experience has been different, but the fact of the matter is that a large segment of the market has such a better experience with Apple products that they're willing to pay a premium.

Not to deny that their cultural position as status symbols is also a big factor, but it is an objective fact that many people actually have better experiences, and not by accident or because it's easy to make that experience work, but due to deliberate hard work by Apple that many competitors have tried and failed to supplant.

> From a technical perspective nothing they do is particularly innovative.

Could not disagree more. While it might look like that on paper if you decompose an Apple product to its parts, there is clear value they are adding as the system integrator. There were very capable Windows Mobile PDAs before the iPhone, and the sensors used existed too, but the particular combination that provided the marvelous user experience never existed before. That is innovation.

What??

iPod was lightyears away of any other MP3 player in the market that time (in capacity, battery and UI)

iPhone pretty much invented the concept of smartphone and apps. The apps themselves were so breakthrough innovation that Microsoft changed "Windows" to acommodate it. Do you understand how big is Windows and how big of a change is to try to include apps on Windows 8?

iPad was such a new concept that almost no one understood it when they launched. People couldn't even imagine how to use it before it came to life and now tablets are everywhere.

C'mon, I ain't no apple fanboy, and I really do believe Steve Jobs is overrated individually, but Apple as company is innovative as one can be. Or are you going to use the same argument against Elon Musk because he didn't "invent" space flight or electric cars?

Lightning strikes Apple time and time again. People like you don't like this for some reason, so they try to rationalize it by blaming it on "marketing".

And why not? Diamonds are nothing but marketing. Red bull is nothing but marketing. Nike is nothing but marketing.

Apple is a huge darling of most journalists. They can do no wrong, and the first exposure most people had to the "innovations" were through Apple's consumer tech.

The McKinsey article linked to "Grow fast or die" in the Techcrunch article is well worth reading:

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet...

> They can do no wrong

It's not true. Remember apple maps fiasco? Or antennagate?