Official Blog of GTM360 Marketing Solutions
I’ve been asked many times to share my take on the latest status of Rakuten Coin, an altcoin that I wrote about in How Blockchain Can Crack The Holy Grail Of Loyalty Programs four years ago. That is not strictly true. I’ve been asked only once, by someone on Twitter. @droskill: The Rakuten coin was launched … Read more
We took the following example of a cybercrime in Why Is It Hard To Catch Cybercriminals? Joe uses a digital payment to buy something from Jane, and does not get what he ordered. (For the uninitiated, A2A RTP stands for Account-to-Account Real Time Payment, where money goes from sender’s bank account to receiver’s bank account … Read more
When the authorities say cash leads to tax evasion, counterfeiting, etc., the common man (“Joe”) thinks it’s because cash is anonymous. When they goad him to ditch cash and move to digital payments, Joe assumes that digital payment will eliminate fraud because it’s not anonymous. Then, one day, Joe uses a digital payment like UPI … Read more
If you sell to a business, you’re B2B. If you sell to a consumer, you’re B2C. That much is clear. According to the popular narrative, if you sell to a business, which sells to a consumer, you’re B2B2C. That’s not correct. The true B2B2C is when Your company sells a product / service to a … Read more
In Credit Card Best Practices – Part 1, I argued that whether credit card is boon or bane is shaped by whether you use it or let yourself get used by it. I then outlined five best practices for using credit card in a way that it serves the cardholder’s interest. In this second part, … Read more
On the one hand, there are people who think credit card is one of the greatest inventions of mankind. On the other hand, there are people who think credit card is a weapon of mass financial destruction. Maximalists put as many of their spends on credit card as possible. Haters shun credit card like the … Read more
I’ve visited several IKEA stores outside India during the past 20+ years. While I haven’t been able to visit the furniture retailer’s first Indian store that opened in Hyderabad four years ago, I got a chance to visit its new store in Mumbai recently. This store is as big as any of the other IKEA … Read more
Many product and service providers entrap consumers in subscriptions that they no longer need or want. The Rogue’s Gallery of shady merchants includes some of the largest and most valuable companies on the planet, as we saw in What Is Subscription Trap?. Uber fines Rider even when Driver cancels. Few Riders jump thru' the hoops … Read more
We saw many best practices to escape Subscription Trap in Six Hacks To Escape Subscription Trap. At the end of the post, we noted that none of them is guaranteed to work in 100% of the cases. Well, then, what is? Some people have told me that you can contact your bank to reverse unwanted subscription … Read more
In What Is Subscription Trap?, we saw several Dark Patterns used by brands and service providers (“Merchants”) to make it difficult for us to cancel subscriptions like Social network e.g. LinkedIn Premium Digital media e.g. Wall Street Journal Streaming video service / OTT e.g. Netflix Hosting service e.g. Hostgator SAAS software e.g. Salesforce In this … Read more