twitter - The Life of Lew Ayotte :: The Life of Lew Ayotte

A Good Example of Bad Customer Service (PayPal)

August 12th, 2010 | Published in Life, Mind

I recently soft-launched my leenk.me web app. leenk.me is a subscription based service that allows people to automatically post to Twitter and Facebook (more coming) whenever they post new content to their WordPress websites. I set the pricing as cheaply as I could, 99 cents every quarter for the basic account, and 2.99$ every quarter for plus accounts. I am using PayPal as my payment gateway, which is probably the easiest and fastest payment gateway to setup. I use to really like PayPal, I would have recommended PayPal to anyone, but their customer service stinks and this problem is just dumbfounding.

I found out a couple days before soft-launch that PayPal has this arbitrary 20% limit on increases to subscriptions. So, if I have a customer who wants to increase their basic membership to a plus membership, PayPal will reject the transaction automatically. The only “work around” is for the customer to cancel their basic membership and sign up for the plus membership. In other words, a real pain in the butt!

This was the conversation log I had with PayPal customer support via email:

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Subject: Amount can only be increased by 20%

I just found out that it is not possible to increase a subscription by 20%. My web service has two account types, the Basic account is .99$ every three months and the Plus
account is 2.99$ every three months.

Obviously, 20% of .99$ is .20$, so I am well exceeding the 20% limit. I want to allow my customers to upgrade/downgrade their accounts as they want. What are my options?

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

Hello, my name is ***** and I am happy to assist you with your question regarding the subscription amount.

In this case, you need to create another subscription button indicating the current amount.

Note: You can create a basic button without logging in, however for advanced button customization you will need to log in. To use the button designer, your web browser must be JavaScript enabled.

1. Go to the PayPal website and log in to your account.
2. Click “Merchant Services” at the top of the page.
3. Click “Subscribe” under Create Buttons.
4. Enter your information to customize the button to your needs.
5. Click “Create Button.”
6. Click “Select Code” to select the button code.
7. Copy and paste the button code into your own web page code.

Note: After creating your first button, click “Go to My saved buttons” and bookmark this page for easy access to your saved buttons.

Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We value what you have to say, and we know situations like this can be difficult. If you have more questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,
*****
PayPal Consumer Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

I don’t think this answers my question…

My issue is with the 20% increase limitation on current subscribers wanting to upgrade.

If a current subscriber is paying .99$/mo for a basic account and wants to change their recurring payment to 2.99$/mo PayPal won’t let them, because it is over the 20% limit on increases.

Thank you.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Hello my name is ****, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding the limit that you would like to impose for your subscription, and understand your frustration and concern over this issue. I am happy to assist you with your questions.

If you have customer who would like to upgrade, you can create another subscription with the upgraded amount by going to the Merchant Services tab and click on the Subscribe button. This will generate a new html code, however, instead of using the button code, there will be an email
tab on your “You are viewing your button code” page where you can copy and paste the link and send that link to your customer via an email so your customer can just click on the “Subscribe” button once he receives the email from you.

Sincerely,
****
PayPal Consumer Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Hello,

I am confused; sending the customer a new subscription code will upgrade their current recurring payment from my .99$ plan to the 2.99$ plan without the 20% limit error (https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_WPRecurringPayments#id086530108PM__id08653060UE6)?

Thank you.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Dear Lew Ayotte,

If you have an issue with integrating PayPal on your website and are in
need of assistance, please open a Merchant Technical Support Ticket by
following the steps below:

1. Go to www.paypal.com and log in to your account.
2. Click ?Contact Us? at the bottom of the page.
3. Enter ?How do I contact merchant technical support,? and click
?Find.?
4. Click ?Developer Support,? and then click ?Developer Support?
again.
5. Click ?Merchant Technical Support.?
6. Enter the required information and click ?Continue.?
7. Click ?Finish Submitting Question.?

Thanks for sharing your concerns with us. We value what you have to say,
and we know situations like this can be difficult. If you have more
questions, visit our Help Center by clicking “Help” in the top right
corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,
PayPal Customer Service Department
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: Lew Ayotte
To: PayPal

Hello,

I created a subscription service for my website. The “basic” level is 99 cents, the “plus” level is 2.99$. I want my subscribers to be able to upgrade their accounts from “basic” to “plus”. However, when I tried to do this I got the error message:

Amount can only be increased by 20%

I have read that there is some arbitrary “20% rule” and I’d like to know what my options are. Obviously there is a big difference between .99 and 2.99, I’d like to make the upgrade process as easy as possible for my subscribers.

Thank you.
Lew A

P.S. This will be the fourth time I’ve asked this question. The first two answers told me to create a new subscription button. The third answer told me to contact you, “Merchant Technical Services”.

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Hello Lew Ayotte,

Thank you for contacting us about Website Payments Standard Subscription on the PayPal Live Site.

We are reviewing your issue and will get back to you when we have an update.

Sincerely,
Merchant Technical Services
PayPal, an eBay Company

From: PayPal
To: Lew Ayotte

Hello Lew,

thank you for contacting MTS Technical Service.

It is indeed true that you can only increase the amount by 20% which is not the case for you. That’s why you get this error message. Unfortunately, there is nothing what we can do about this.

Feel free to contact us if you have further questions.

Kind regards,

*******

Tags: facebook, leenk.me, paypal, twitter

How to fix WordPress MultiSite switch_to_blog() permalinks

August 11th, 2010 | Published in Mind

If you are using switch_to_blog() in your WordPress MultiSite installation and notice that your permalinks contain “/blog/” in them (or some other oddity). The give John James Jacoby’s plugin Switch Site Rewrite a go.

Today I ran into this problem with a WPMS site that I am developing. I needed to pull posts from the “news” site onto the main site. I used switch_to_blog() to do this, but when I tried to get specific category permalinks with get_category_links() it would automatically include “/blog/” in the URL.

This is because of the way that the $wp_rewrite variable is initialized and an attempt to reduce overhead when using switch_to_blog(). So, John’s plugin does come with a risk of added overhead, but I’m currently dealing with a 30 site installation and don’t see much of a cost. If you were really picky, you could modify his code a bit to only work in real specific situations.

If you get a chance, jump on over to twitter and thank him for this little plugin. It saved me a little more development work, although it also meant I wasted 2 hours tracking down the problem :).

Tags: get_category_links, permalinks, plugin, switch_to_blog, twitter, wordpress, wpms

Choose Your Weapon T-Shirt by Ian Leino

July 3rd, 2010 | Published in Life

I follow a very talented designer on Twitter named Ian Leino. A few weeks ago he tweeted about a contest he was putting on to win one of his latest t-shirt designs called “Choose Your Weapon”.

As with so many people, video games have been a major contributing medium of my cultural education since as far back as I can recall. One of my earliest memories is actually being four years old and pushing a stepstool up to a video game cabinet so I could play Q-Bert (for about 12 seconds). For this design, I wanted to highlight some of the most awesome ‘weapons’ from the history of video games including some of my personal favorites (but less obvious ones) like the Arkanoid paddle, the line piece from Tetris and the Katamari. (from ianleino.com)

Well I actually won a t-shirt and he kindly sent me it for free, it’s a nice American Apparel t-shirt. – very comfy! With the “Choose Your Weapon” design screen printed on the shirt. Here are a couple photos of me wearing the shirt.

By the way, this is the second Twitter contest I’ve won. So, if you’re not on Twitter, you should be :). You can follow my tweets at http://twitter.com/lewayotte.

Tags: contest, geek, twitter

Should Twitter Ban Users for using the ‘accept username’ Vulnerability?

May 10th, 2010 | Published in Mind

Recently a Twitter vulnerability was leaked that allowed Twitter users to type ‘accept username‘ (where username was another twitter user) and it forced that user to follow you. For instance, the last time I looked Conan O’Brien’s account had over 300 followers. Even though he said he was only going to follow 1 random person (Sarah Killen @LovelyButton).

UPDATE: Twitter has responded to this vulnerability and is in the process of rolling back the invalid follows.