MasterCard's virtual reality purchases deliver not-so-virtual headaches

One of the most powerful attributes of e-commerce today is its relatively effortless due diligence, where a customer can easily see rival offerings, compare pricing based on the exact model number and/or specifications, and browse the comments left by customers (which may not always be valid, but that's another issue).

That due diligence nicety was swept aside by a MasterCard move last week to integrate purchases within mobile virtual reality (VR) environments. To be fair, this mobile VR purchasing effort by MasterCard is one of the first industry efforts to allow anything other than "sit and watch" in a VR app, so the effort should be encouraged. They may intend to add due diligence capabilities later on — remember what Amazon's initial homepage looked like — but such user-friendly efforts are not typical from MasterCard.

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