Over the last 4-6 weeks I have been going back and forth with credit companies in attempts to get several retailers up and running with a credit processing implementation. I have come to the conclusion that it is a wonder anyone can process a credit card. And no wonder merchants have to pay a transaction fee, the cost of all this complication has to be accounted for somewhere — may as well make the merchant pay for it! Sheesh…

There are too many moving parts. And while many moving parts doesn’t necessarily mean something is complicated, it does make the possibility higher. And in this case, too high. POS software, payment processors, banks, oh my!

Why do people insist on making things more complicated than they need to be? For heavens sake… messages are sent back and forth in bytes… bytes! One character is off and it screws up everything. Everything has to be configured exactly correctly, and there are hundreds of ways to screw it up.

Everyone keeps saying “it’s just the nature of the beast”. I don’t accept that as an excuse for software that I have control over — if it’s complicated then it’s wrong. But I guess have to live with the reality. Arghhhh…

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 10:28 am and is filed under Retail, Software Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.