Comments on: Amazon invests in Bill Me Later. Our advice: Say no now

No payments for six months! Is there a catch? You bet.

[smartjuice]

one more way to involve in online fraud and wow, they need

" last four digits of your social security number." who wants to go ahead and do it, especially lots of spamers are out there, why not just pay right away , sooner or later we need to pay anyways. Sometimes Its better to buy stuff from (physical) store.

[kbq71]

Amazon does a great job of taking the friction out of online shopping and this is just another step in that direction. Personally, I love Amazon Prime and have greatly increased my spend on Amazon.com as a result. My only complaint is that you have to wade through pages of non-prime-eligible items when you search on Amazon.com. Instead, I use http://www.iprimr.com which is a search tool that returns ONLY those items on Amazon.com that are eligible for prime.

[outtanames999]

You're kidding, right? As usual, I disagree with almost everything Rafe says.

Free money is free money. No interest is great deal if you use it correctly. And you're a sucker if you don't because the cost of that interest is already built into the product.

Almost every computer, printer, copy machine, fax machine, monitor, etc. I have ever purchased (dozens over the years), whether for personal or business use, I have purchased with interest free deals.

Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA (though not long for this world), all offer interest free deals in the offline world. Online merchants must offer the same deals to compete. Now they can.

Today with automatic payments from a checking account, I just divide out the payments to ensure that all is paid in full before the free interest period expires and the bank does the grunt work. I just make sure the monthly payments are set to arrive a few days before they are actually due to avoid triggering any "fine print" clauses for late payments.

Especially for business purchases, this smooths out the cash flow and enables large equipment purchases to be handled affordably.

If Bill Me Later works the same way, I'll certainly try it.

[billrubin]

> 1-Click shopping and Amazon Prime both defer the presentation of the real
> costs of acquiring products

I can understand this comment with 1-Click because you may not see the shipping costs until after the purchase is complete, but don't understand how it applies to Prime. Yeah, the customer has to pay $79 up front for the free 2-day/cheap 1-day shipping but that's pretty obvious. And then the customer knows exactly what they are paying when they check out because there is generally no shipping charge added.