Why aren’t there cheap mass produced credit card machines for transacting safely on the Internet?

I am expecting a scathing answer from someone who knows about all this.

*cringe*

However, until I get it I am going to keep asking this simple question. Why aren’t there cheap mass produced credit card machines on which you swipe any one of your credit or debit cards safely, and buy anything you wish to from the Internet? No one needs to know your card details, your pin, you don’t need to type in anything on a website.

Chances of fraud are eliminated as you yourself are swiping the machine.

And you will only need to buy one machine for all of your online purchases. In fact, you may need just one personal credit card machine for your entire life. After all these machines are built for high frequency use over long periods of time, and most people will only use them a few times a week.

One obvious reason may be the cost of technology to connect a personal credit card machine to the payment system of a particular website. However, from my limited understanding of credit card machines, they basically connect over a telephone line to a particular credit card network/bank/financial institution. Which means that every website can have a specific number displayed, where a buyer needs to dial in through his credit card machine, to make a payment.

Sounds so simple, yet there is a major catch somewhere (I have a feeling that it will be an embarrassingly simple answer, as I have always been slightly ‘all things financial’ challenged).

If you have reached here, I am sure you have some theories or better still you have a concrete answer to my question. Please be kind enough to post it in the comments.

An enormous admirable effort, if only it could be tweaked a bit!

This is an ad for a spray that relieves throat irritation.

The concept is fab, the twist of ‘weak si goli’ (a play of words on the Hindi television ad about the ‘Vicks ki goli’ – translation is ‘the Vicks lozenge’, with ‘weak si goli’ translating to a ‘weak lozenge’) is awesome but I felt that somehow the message got a little lost in the craft.

The part where the gothic opera heightens the effects of the ‘goli’ should have been brought down a couple of notches. It creates a very potent audio burr that takes away from what comes afterwards. The punch line and the greater effectiveness of Lary Spray gets weakened. And a voice over that is indistinct further adds to this. They are saying ‘weak si goli’ so they should say it loud and clear, not half-heartedly hidden away.

This is such a lovely effort, if only it could be tweaked a little bit. The over-dramatization of the effects of the cough lozenge brought down a few notches, the voice over made clearer and the product demo given a teeny weeny bit more space. Of course, as always, this is just my opinion and I could be totally wrong :)

I have become an enormous fan of enormous, the ad agency that made the ad, though!