Rant - Payment System

[iguanairs]

You know what I HATE about this site? The payment system!

Like most people here, we have real jobs and have limited amounts of time where we can work on our websites. Well today I visited this site and was going to download the newest version of vBgallery for an upgrade but found I had expired a week ago. No big deal, I just went ahead and renewed my access for it.

I get the paypal confirmation and even got an email from Photopost that says this:

If you purchased a license for PhotoPost or ReviewPost, we will provide
you with access to our members download area within 1 business day,
and usually within a few hours or less. We manually verify all orders
for your protection and ours but we understand that you want to download
the software ASAP.

You aren't protecting me by making me wait. Your current setup is so horrid you might be protecting yourself, but you certainly aren't protecting me. If I were granted immediate access, which I SHOULD be, the worse that could happen is someone just renewed my account for me and maybe got a free copy of the software as a result. (Which they could have obtained from pirate sites anyways.)

There are MUCH larger sites out there, like vBulletin, that grant immediate access after you renew. They utilize paypals IPN. It's a very easy program to implement. It documents everything if setup correctly. It also prevents PAYING customers from waiting for something they paid for!

None of us should have to wait more than 5 minutes to access what we paid for. I renewed the script a couple hours ago and still can't download it. That means that the time I had to work on my site was wasted.

Could you PLEASE upgrade your purchasing system so those of us on limited time schedules don't get stuck waiting for you to approve our payment. I HATE that aspect of this site.

Thanks for letting me rant. lol But seriously, the system needs an upgrade. Customers in this day and age shouldn't have to wait.

I see Chuck was on today at 1:12 PM (my time). I paid for the renewal at 11:45am. If there is a third party that approves payment, that DEFINANTLY needs to go. Chuck should have approved it 3 hours ago!

[Chuck S]

First off Chuck does not have anything to do with customer service and order processing. I am a developer and support technician

Just an observation on your rant. Any customer who orders a license renewal whatever is informed of the policy on what time it can take to process orders before they place their orders it is one of the first things listed on the order page. all orders are hand processed by customer service as that is the requirements of the banking system because of the amount of software piracy out there.

[iguanairs]

Thats why I post "if there is a third party", lol. I wasn't sure if you dealt with payments or not.

Paypal offers IPN. They could/should integrate that into the payment processors. Those that pay with paypal get immediate access that way. Those that don't may have to wait.

Piracy isn't the issue over actual payments made because a pirate can get this stuff off of pirating websites. Run a search for "NULLED". Thats what they do to scripts to steal them.

I have been using sites with PP IPN and have never had an issue with it. There is no piracy issue if they are coding their script properly. I use IPN on one of my websites and have never had an issue with it. The data is transferred and then stored in my DB with their IP and other info. Not once have I had problems with it.

Waiting in this day and age isn't required. Its a matter of them coding in some if conditionals to check for what method of payment is going out, send the user to PP, send the user back and verify the payment, and have the script update the renewal automatically instead of someone setting it in manually. (Which is where the issue is.)

[Chuck S]

I am going to use vbulletin as an example here as well which is one of the biggest software licensees out there most people in our market deal with. Their payment system is the same way. In fact I had to wait 72 hours for one of my vb licenses. You must wait for order processing to hand process and check the order. This is just how it is and I am sorry it is not going to change. From what I have been told this is what our bank demands hand processing and verification and fraud checks on every last order.

[0ptima]

The last 2 times I made payments with paypal to this company, I got access to my member area within a few hours!

[bennac40]

I would rather have my order hand processed in any website, then rather having to deal with the bank for a transaction I didnt do. This kind of processing protects the PayPal or credit card owner. Even if it has to take to send in some personal information such as a copy of the credit card with only the last 4 digits visible and an ID.

This was required from me when I purchased my vBulletin License because I was ordering from Morocco with my credit card which is from my bank account in America. As soon as I sent my copies, I was granted access within 10 min which was very fast.

Same think for PhotoPost I was asked to explain how Im ordering from Morocco while the account is in the USA. Its their job to protect themselves from chargebacks of products already given access to and downloaded.

These are non-tangible goods

Greetings from Morocco!!

[Chuck S]

Yes thanks for your observation most people do not understand this. Thats why I use vbulletin as an example since they are one of the biggest software manufacturers in our market. They use the same policies as us. I can not say why they do it but i know our bank requires us to hand process orders for authenticity and it protects both you and us. The merchandise is non tangible goods. Therefore we do things like check address records on the name. The email ownership IP tracking domain ownership etc to ensure the person purchasing from us is a legitimate order and customer. As Optima points out most orders are processed within a few hours. Usual hold ups are from customers not answering emails customer service sends with questions.