i would pay more money to not have to put my credit card into or attach my identity to 100 different random websites all of which almost certainly have worse security practices than amazon and many of which absolutely will have that data stolen at some point.
even for people who don't think about stuff like that, it's way easier for the average person to buy everything from a single place than to go to a bunch of different random websites to buy things they want.
I coded a credit card payment a few times in my career and from what I saw it's always just a token. That token could be only used to make transactions from your account to the specific vendor's account. Of course there's always could be some incompetent developer who thought that saving credit card data into a database is a great idea, but overall it's not as risky as people think.
There was this feature provided by banks. I remember BofA was one. Unfortunately they removed it. You could create a temporary credit card number for specific vendor.
It even had option to set one time limit or recurring limit.
I don't understand why it was taken away, was it giving too much control to the customer?
Google offers virtual credit card numbers fyi. I don’t think they are vendor locked, but offer a potential solution for you. Albeit one with additional drawbacks.
I don't know why people get paranoid about this, in the US and most Western countries payment processing has minimum security requirements and you have blanket protection from fraud by credit card companies anyway. All of this means in practice consumers are very safe putting credit card details on websites. The websites that don't have the skill to meet minimum security requirements find a payment processor, so a hacker wouldn't get it from website, they'd have to get it from a processor like Stripe or Paypal.
It is. I've even found myself searching within the shop app to find products from smaller stores vs the larger stores. It's nice they have a shipment tracker built in and so far i've not had any issues. They're even running promotions / incentives with their Shop Cash, so they're trying for sure.
I would (and sometimes do) pay more money to not give money to Amazon. Also, I feel like the vast majority of sites support Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal and/or Venmo these days so I rarely find myself entering my credit card number.
even for people who don't think about stuff like that, it's way easier for the average person to buy everything from a single place than to go to a bunch of different random websites to buy things they want.