Wait you have to have a Google account just to order a pixel phone? How dumb would you have to be to do that when you're doing shady reselling deals? But this is why I distrust any online transaction that cannot be done without a guest account unless there's some solid reason. There's no such reason for buying a phone.
Lots of people dont' have a google checkout account. Not very many countries are used on the buyer side, and even few on the seller side. Additionally, its shitty as hell to setup on the phone if you've never heard of it.
Google checkout is the thing keeping me from buying apps. I've been close to buying apps a few times, but then I have to go through the hassle of setting up a Google checkout account on my phone and decide that it's not worth it just for some app.
What Google really should to if they want to get people buying apps is to make a deal with the carriers so that apps I buy show up on my phone bill. If they did that then there would be no barrier at all for anyone to buying apps and I no doubt would have bought several by now.
> You may only purchase Devices for your personal use. You may not commercially resell any Device, but you may give the Device as a gift. Recipients of gifts may need to open and maintain a Google Payments account in order to receive any support offered by Google. These Terms apply to any gift recipient.
I'd like to see you walk into an Apple store, and buy 10 iPhones. Or say, 100?
In fact - Apple even introduced controls to stop scalping of Genius Bar appointments:
Or say you create 100 email accounts - john001@gmail.com, john002@gmail.com, john003@gmail.com etc. - and have them each buy a phone, and ship them to a single physical address.
It's certainly possible to see how this would come across as hijacking or botnet fraud.
crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup
Why does Google care about the trust of scammers? Some customers are not worth the effort. This time it was a mass phone scalping scheme, next time it might be a fraudulent click scheme. Google is better off if people like that never use one of their products again.
It's as if some person kicked out of a store for shoplifting swore they'd never shop there ever again. Good!
It also really needs to be mentioned that Google’s store was (is) absolutely awful for buying gear.
I wanted to buy 2 pixels from them. Put the order in, no news for 7 days, at the exact 7 day mark my order gets cancelled. Tried talking to customer support with no success because there isn’t any.
So I put the order in the second time and the exact same thing happens: after exactly 7 days, my order gets cancelled. I say f’ it and buy from a local dealer, with next day delivery.
A few days after the fact, I try using my credit card for something and my transaction gets denied (I had a -200 euros limit). I call the bank and they tell me that there’s a hold on my account from Google, for the price of both orders (about 1500 euros I think) and they are waiting for the funds so it can clear. My only two options is to talk to Google to cancel the charge (lol) or wait 30 days.
I simply closed my card and got a new one.
A few months later I started getting notifications that transactions on this card are being rejected - someone was trying to buy stuff for 1-3$ with my card but it was closed so they didn’t go through. Since I mostly use virtual cards for online stuff (which Google doesn’t like), and the physical card rarely, there is a really big chance that my credit card number got leaked from Google, but there is no way for me to prove that.
Nobody bought anything from Google. This is like Apple coming to you saying "we're making you a laptop, pay up" and you saying "But I never ordered one from you"
This is kinda odd, Google Checkout and Paypal were at each other's throats a few months ago. I wonder what the advantage for Google is?
Sure, it gets access to Paypal's large installed userbase, but that being said, is it conceivable that all Android users don't already have Google accounts with credit card info?
When you buy from Apple, you buy using Apple's checkout process. Why ever would anyone think that Android would use anything but Google's checkout process?
I signed up to be notified. I tried to buy many times and failed. I lost time and sleep because Google decided to play all these tricks on us. I never got an e-mail or any sort of communication. I guess it depends on your definition of customer but in the physical world when someone goes in a store to purchase something and talks with the staff I would consider them to meet the definition of a customer.
EDIT: Let's say you drive to a store knowing a product is going on sale. You go to a shelf, they have pieces of paper saying take this paper and claim the product at the register. You take the paper. You queue up, you get to the register and they tell you tough luck, we have no inventory. Wouldn't you be annoyed? Then you leave the store to find stalls of people selling the product for double the price.
This sort of stuff can happen but it would be nice if Google said something about it. The only thing they told the community is "sold out" and "check again soon". I was hoping to use this phone while traveling next month but I'll have to make some other arrangements for a reasonable unlocked phone.
I am not sure why you need a google bank account to do one click buying with them. You can literally buy almost anything with google checkout and wallet (conditionally the merchant supports them)
Can someone explain the scheme to me? I don't quite understand it. I buy a phone from Google, then ship it to NH, they sell it in NH and I make a profit? How? How could it possibly be enough to make it worth it?
What if Google just starts buying stuff for you and having it shipped to your house. You can opt-out once it arrives -- if you can figure out the RMA process...
It wasn't intentional - it was a question of convenience. I searched for the Nexus 7 on the Amazon app on iPhone after reading the story, but then found out that I needed to pay on Google. I didn't want to fill out the payment info for Google on my phone as a matter of convenience, and I never returned to Google's site from my laptop to follow through with purchasing.
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