Am I crazy if for something like an online purchase, I kind of expect it to take a second or two to process the payment, so I would assume something went wrong if it was 200ms?

I’ve definitely had in the UX side a situation where the PM/Owner types asked me to introduce a delay in the “disabled button with loading spinner” such that the user sees it for a visible amount of time because our API was too fast for their taste.

For one of the supermarket chains I frequent, from me handing over the single item I'm purchasing I can be walking away within 20s. They scan the item, then a loyalty barcode on my phone and finally I tap my iPhone which has my bank card loaded onto it.

Basically, they don't have any significant bottlenecks, POS hardware + software is responsive with an efficient UI for the operator, and the card machine is a wired connection to a router with a fibre uplink.

IIRC TurboTax has a bunch of loaders / spinners like this, similar idea.

I don’t think a visa transaction can go faster than about a half second so definitely something off there.

With the speed of modern internet connections, I'd honestly think something were wrong if it took a couple of seconds. I'd expect almost instantaneous results. What amazes me every time is the amount of things happening in that short amount of time though. The amount of endpoints/channels the signal has to go through to go from "I want to buy this" to "You bought it!".

It only inserts a sku and a quantity into a Postgres database - yeah, there’s a few things missing from this purchase scenario.

Might have been better to have made it clicking a ‘like’ button.

Same, I call it the perception of work.

I agree that purchases on e-commerce sites are virtually never this fast; but I have used some extremely fast physical payment terminals (e.g., Square): sometimes it seems like the transaction is sub 300ms, which I find very impressive given the complexity of payment processing.

I think it was a poor choice of example, because people will expect payment to be involved. They’re actually just inserting a row into a database for the order; presumably payment is to be handled out-of-band.

Your comment reminded me of when Google introduced "Instant Search" in 2010. Here's an old HN thread from the launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391

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