V.me - or Fuck.me at least in the British market.
Visa announced the beta launch of new website V.me as a new financial service – loosely described as an alternative to PayPal.
“V.me is a new service from Visa that lets you shop without sharing your card account information with the seller when you pay. “
Unfortunately, in the UK the reference to a “V” or “reverse V sign” literally means “Fuck off”. 😀
In other words, Visa is telling the British “fuck me” with the lack of forethought and research into that segment of the Visa market.
Meanwhile, Visa.me – which would have been more appropriate to use as a personalized gateway – brings up a system error:
Our apologies.. The page you’ve requested cannot be found. Please check that you have entered in the correct address (URL), or perhaps the page no longer exists, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. To assist with your query, you will now be redirected to the Visa Global Gateway.
What an epic failure by Visa, just days after the successful sale of Meet.me by a trio of top-tier domainers.
LoL! That’s a good one. Maybe this’ll make it a PR gag 🙂
“…loosely described as an alternative to PayPal.”
For the consumer making a payment it might be an alternative to PayPal but not so for someone receiving those payments.
From what I can gather from the site you would need an existing merchant account in order to accept payments.
From V.me:
“V.me supports any major credit or debit card you accept. You just add the V.me checkout experience to your site and use the same merchant account you use today. “
You can watch a Baroness give this sign to a Lord here:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/video/skyoddly-14898207/baroness-gives-lord-two-fingers-27263061.html
Sir W. Churchill had a penchant for it – mostly with fingers inverted. Also very acceptable in China in this manner. The meaning’s probably made clearer if simply the index finger is employed. No mistaking that one.
As for Visa – just another costly marketing debacle.