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Google Checkout Sees Poor Customer Satisfaction
Aryabhata writes "Ars Technica reports on a survey by investment firm J.P. Morgan Securities, stating that Google Checkout has had a relatively quick and modest market penetration of six percent since its launch in June of 2006, but lags behind in customer satisfaction vs PayPal. On the customer satisfaction front, only 18.8 percent reported having a 'good' or 'very good' experience with Google Checkout, while 81.2 percent indicated a fair to poor experience customer experience compared to PayPal's 44.2 percent reporting good experiences. Some users have reported anecdotally that Google Checkout mistakenly canceled sales without warning or that the checkout process took too long."
....pinch me! this is the first time i've heard of something touched by google not instantly turning to gold! Personally, i would use paypal. It's not perfect but it gets the job done and tbh i spend enough on online purchases that it shouldnt really be made any easier. keep at it Google, never give up the dream! //first post on /. /no hate ////hurrah for slashes
This is very weird. I used google checkout for more than 15 checkouts so far (and about a similar amount of paypal checkouts - mainly ebay - for the same period) and I was impressed by how much faster google checkout was.
I admit I only tried google thanks to the amazing $10-$20 off promos, but it really did seem to me way better than paypal. I guess if I had an order cancelled I would complain - but in such a case do we know for sure it is google's fault and not the merchants?
Forgeting about ease of checkout, I always hoped for a paypal rival, since paypal has a severely bad track record of not paying or at least widtholding amounts with absurd excuses etc.
It's in beta so it is to be expected? :)
For me personally, Google Checkout is useless until:
1. It supports merchants outside the USA.
2. It supports buyers outside the USA.
I've been looking for Paypal alternatives for years now but I've yet to find one which satisfies the above requirements, is cheap enough *and* is trusted by enough people.
Google sucks at anything that requires some amount of human interaction. They are good at putting things on auto-pilot but that doesn't work everywhere.
Some users have reported anecdotally that Google Checkout mistakenly canceled sales without warning
This happened to me. Ordered a Creative webcam from buy.com and used Google checkout to get $10 off.
A few weeks later I wondered where it was, went to Google's and buy.com's status pages, which reported "Order was cancelled. Reason: Order was cancelled." Great. Did not even receive an email notification. They did postback the charge to my credit card, though.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
I think it was a bad choice to restrict users to US-based ones. A whole lot of people outside US might be willing to use Google's approach because they can't / won't use Paypal.
But Google was too lazy to actually implement something proper (though Adwords works outside US).
I'll say that Checkout is mature when I see it among the methods of paying for Slashdot subscription :)
I purchased a back ordered lens from Ritz Camera and used Google checkout for the $750 purchase. I realized it would take some time to get the lens and was prepared to wait. I was pleasantly suprised, one week before xmas, to receive and email saying the lens had been shipped and my CC charged. I waited a week and called Ritz Camera to check on it's shipping only to learn it hadn't shipped and this was a mistake on Google Checkout's part. Then the horror began. Many calls and emails to Google and Ritz failed to resolve the issue. Google would just blame Ritz. Ritz was obviously very frustrated with Google and told us they were trying to get them to resolve the issue because it had affected lots of customers. This went on for 3 weeks without resolution. My CC billing cycle was at the point where I'd have to soon pay this amount or challenge it as I couldn't seem to get a credit. My only option, and the option I took, was to cancel the order with Ritz. I promptly received a wonderful email from Google telling me the order had been cancelled and the money credited. I then placed the order at B&H Photo.
In comparison to the PayPal website, the Google Checkout site is not very user friendly at all. The PayPal site is very easy to understand and very well designed, providing a lot of useful information that's easy to access. The Google Checkout site is maybe a little too simple and very lean on helpful information. Also, resellers like Buy.com maintaining separate invoice systems for Google Checkout is a pita.
I was one of the many who signed up for a Google Checkout account due to the $20 off $50 discounts avaliable through some merchants over the holidays and have since stopped using it. It's nice, but I definitely prefer PayPal.
Well, most services coming from US-based companies only support US residents. Most US merchants won't ship outside US - google checkout or not - and many won't accept non-US credit cards even for shipping within the US. It is unfortunate, but it is not something to complain about when it comes to google checkout, since this behavior is the norm and not an exception.
But give it a little time, I am sure it would be much harder for google to support non-US customers, but if it can be done they might do it eventually.
I've only used it once, but it didn't seem too bad to me. Maybe a little ackward going from the seller's site (buy.com IIRC) to Google Checkout, but it worked fine. I also liked the fact that there was a special at the time where you got $20 off of items over $50 if you used Google Checkout. I don't know if that was just through buy.com or not, but it was a good deal considering the thing I was buying cost just over $50.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
From what I've heard Paypal can be pretty sleazy. Them beating Google of all people... blows my mind.
Is it just really buggy? I havn't used it yet.
Tag it 'penetration' everyone ;)
They just bought keyhole and put their own nametag on the keyhole viewer.
I know another software company that happened to drown in money and used it to just buy everybody and everything they might find usefull...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I can't believe it would be ranked so poorly. I've used it for any online purchase I could in the last several months and not once have I had a problem. I prefer it to paypal. Paypal blows, they're a bunch of greedy losers.
"compared to PayPal's 44.2 percent reporting good experiences."
Are you sure you don't want to not use a non-credit card account to not complete this transaction? Give us access to an account you can't issue a chargeback with and we'll give you a shiny raffle ticket!
Seriously, with a numeric majority of those polled saying they didn't have a positive experience with PayPal, just how hard can it be to top them?
I've had a great experience with them up until about a month ago.
After several successful purchases were made on my website and money deposited into my NetBank (www.netbank.com) bank account, I got an email one day saying I have to switch my bank account on file to a "non-virtual money service" within 30 days or else they would stop depositing money into it. Are you kidding? NetBank has been around for years, is FDIC insured, and I have 4 various real bank accounts with them, from a Checking account all the way to a Roth IRA. They have a person you can call 24/7 and the only difference is you mail in deposits (in postage paid envelopes) instead of driving to the bank.
After lots of email back and forth, and complete refusal to talk to me on the phone about this ("We don't provide phone support" they tell me, as if I wanted help making a Google Checkout button or something), I continue to get the same answer - go get a new bank or don't use our service.
Not a good sign if this is how they treat the merchants offering their service as a payment method.
In my case, several months too long. I'm in the UK, and we were excluded from the service from the outset so it really hasn't been available for me to become dissatisfied with.
:'-(
It's a shame, though, because I was helping someone set up a small ecommerce site last July and Google Checkout offered exactly the service I needed, except that they didn't because I live in the UK.
I have been thinking about why google got into this business, and why they were offering ridiculous amounts off (I used the $20 off of orders over $50 myself) to use the service.
Clearly, there is money to be made in the third party credit card processing biz. Witness Yahoo and Paypal.
Also, I think there is an advantage for them to have their own ecomm facilities. They are starting to offer pay services (one of the earliest I have seen is charging for more space in Picassa's online web album), and having a well established ecomm service will allow them to charge for a variety of other things easily. And, the more credit card orders they process, the better rates they get from credit card companies.
Finally, once they associate your financial information with your google account, they can use it to target advertising. If you read their privacy policy, they admit to doing just that (sharing non-transactional data from Google Payment Corporation and Google), but there is a way to opt out, although you can only do that through email, which seems really lame.
I had an issue during the Christmas season that occurred with a Google Checkout purchase, though I'm not sure if the problem was with Buy.com or with Google Checkout. I ordered a last minute gift on December 14th. Apparently the order was canceled, but I didn't receive and email telling me this until the 21st, which meant that if I wanted to get a gift for this person by Christmas morning, I had to partake in mall madness - fighting for parking spaces, huge crowds, and all of the good stuff being sold out.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one that had this issue, and I'm sure that this sort of thing happens much more often during the holidays, so I'm wondering if the approval rating would have been higher if Google had launched this service well before the holidays, where there would be less vendor (and Google) screw ups.
Also, getting from Buy.com to Google Check Out wasn't very intuitive, it took me a few minutes to figure it out. This isn't Google's fault, though this definately had a negative effect on my buying experience. Had Google not been offering $10 off of my purchase, I would have given up and used a credit card instead.
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I could not comment on satisfaction one way or another because I have not ever seen a google checkout yet.
I don't like Paypal! Yet I do like EBay. There are other obscure ways out there too.
My personal favorite is when right near the checkout is also a 1-800 number.
For now my main reason for switching accounts to PayPal is the relative (to PayPal) lack of phishing. This will change, I'm sure.
I'll also note that their tech support was extremely responsive and helpful recently as I was working through the format of XML interaction with their service, and they also host helpful discussion forums.
First, a lot of the usability problems from the vendor poorly implementing the payment and order status process.
But it is more important to note that they appear to be completely different services. Paypal is a service for making payments and GCO is a service for making purchases. As far as I can see, the transaction is passed entirely to GCO once the order being placed (like a payment gateway). Paypal is treated more like a credit card at most merchants. I speculate that there could be some advantages in terms of security and possibly tax benefits if the govt ever starts taxing internet transactions and GCO can claim any state/country for transaction purposes. But I could be wrong.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Personally, i would use paypal.
Personally, I wouldn't. I'd already heard enough on them withholding payments on dubious grounds that I won't even consider setting up an account (which I might otherwise have considered for buying/selling stuff on EBay).
However, a while back I wanted to pay for something, and PayPal gave the impression you could do this through them without setting up an account. Yet when I actually tried paying, every step seemed to want account details, or be forcing me in that direction. I concluded that (at best) it *might* have been theoretically possible to pay without an account, but that the process was deliberately designed to make this hard, and to bully and niggle you into setting one up.
That wasn't going to happen, and I wasn't prepared to fight this nonsense over God-knows-how-many screens. Partly because I didn't have the inclination, and partly because it confirmed that PayPal were a lousy, self-interested company who didn't give a damn for their customers' interests. From what I've read elsewhere in this thread, this was the right conclusion; PayPal don't even look like a good bet for simple payments.
Half their BS "guarantees" don't even apply in the UK (where I stay) anyway.
PayPal is a deal-breaker; I won't use it, period.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Telling the truth about PayPal is now taboo? I'm sorry, but PayPal has reaped what it sowed by screwing people over so much.
i must be one of the lucky paypal users that have never had a problem using them. Granted i have never sold anything online (and are not likely too), i merely consume. so perhaps that has something to do with it
Google checkout has two things Paypal does not.
1) no ties to your bankaccount so they can't freeze your assets
2) a trustworthy company that actually has contact information.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I can sympathize with your problems, however I also understand why Google would have done what they have done. I mean seriously Google cannot just tell you that your number has been blacklisted. Theoritically if you were the bad guy you now know not to use the number at Google, or even at all. If they don't say that will allow the Credit Card company to collect more information, and possibly catch the bad guy. Otherwise he simply moves onto the next poor fool's card number.
Now I do find it odd that your CC company did not call you to let you know. But perhaps that was because Google did not notify said company.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
A few months ago I developed a checkout system that used a number of payment options, I found google checkout to be the most complicated and the slowest when compared to paypals array of payment processing options (payflow pro, etc) or other merchant account setups.
. .to...finish.
Google checkout was the only processor (that I used) that had a distributed processing engine. Unlike say paypal where you execute a POST request and the response code comes back in the same transaction, google is more "fire and wait for a callback", you setup a callback URL to process the google checkout responses, then you start submitting your XML shopping carts and...just...wait...for...8...XML...transactions.
I'm not blaming XML here mind you, but after the user hits "submit" with their credit card information it takes 8 requests to fully process, and in the case of AMEX that timeframe is usually 30 minutes to an hour(ouch!) Compare at paypal which I've never seen take longer than 2 minutes, or a merchant account setup which takes 1-5 seconds.
This may be OK if you sell an actual product as the consumer is accustom to waiting a few days for their package to ship/arrive, however it is quite unacceptable when say, selling a service where most users are used to seeing (almost) immediate responses.
Also (at the time of my development) you cannot remove the shipping protocols out of the transaction, google requires you to acknowledge that yes in fact your order has shipped, even if there is no shipping of a product (very confusing for users when they receive a "your order has shipped!" email.)
As for the project I was working on, the clients decided google was too slow, they ended up dropping them as a payment option even though they had better rates than paypal.
Wah Sig!
My biggest complaint is that the charges don't come through as the vendor whom I purchased the product through but from GOOGLE. This fucks with all my automatic crap I have setup for quicken..grr.
My experience with PayPal is also that it is adversarial and tricky.
Billionaires often feel that they are better than everyone else, and that they don't have to be open and honest. The billionaires who run eBay seem to think that way.
--
U.S. government violence in Iraq caused more violence, not peaceful democracy.
So like anything else, when we have a lot more data, we can make a better assessment. The initial one isn't a bad one to do, but let's not make the assumption that it's set in stone. From my personal assessment, I've had a great experience and like the setup, design, experience and implementation. I had one fantastically ugly problem that was entirely on the end of the vendor and I cited it as such. If I'd used paypal, I'd likely have had exactly the same problem and be just as pissed. However, I think the merchant rating system is more accessible and transparent in Google from what I have seen, though I've not looked as hard at Paypal--honestly, because until now, there weren't a lot of options that I considered valid.
They had a bug which screwed up credit card entry in konqueror, I reported on it and a month later I noticed the bug had been fixed(who knows when it was actually fixed). I would have to say thats fair given they had a bug in the first place and they never bothered to tell me it was fixed, but they actually fixed the bug.
indeed. google checkout makes you jump through so many fewer hoops than paypal. It's clear that most of the nonsense on paypal is for them to try to really rope you into being a regular user rather than have a convenient one-time interaction, but I do wonder if there is a bit more security inherent in some of the extra steps paypal takes. I was also disappointed to see that google checkout saved my credit card information on their server without ever explicitly warning me that they would do this (at least I never saw the fine print if it was there). Fortunately it was fairly simple to go in and delete the credit info.
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Take this from this satisfied Google Checkout customer - I bought more shit this Christmas season than I did in two previous combined. Why? Because of two things - Checkout promo gave me $10 off $30 and $20 off $50, and I didn't have to enter my fucking credit card info again and again. Now that promotion is over, I prefer stores that have Checkout as a payment option and if price is not drastically higher, buy my stuff there. I hate "creating accounts" in stores and trying to recall what the password was two months down the road when shopping there again. Google Checkout also has hands down the most convenient UI and most readable emails. As an added bonus, merchant DOES NOT HAVE your email, so they can't spam you. Try it, it's a great service.
I know many people who use PayPal for intermittent or even frequent eBay purchases, and not one has mentioned any problems to me.
But we're talking about money here. If they hold your money, it feels like theft, because it is, and that's incredibly infuriating. So a small percentage of users (much less than 1%, I gather) are very vociferous in their objections.
As far as I can tell, go ahead and use it to buy stuff, and you're wildly unlikely to notice anything difficult. If you were to be an eBay power seller, though, it would be different.
My only gripe about it (so far) is that I didn't get the $10 off for signing up. Of course, I used my gmail account ID, but I hadn't ever used Google Checkout before, and had to enter all my information (thus, IMO, "creating" a GC account). I'll appeal but I'm not too thrilled about having to.
Fortunately it was fairly simple to go in and delete the credit info.
Remember the Iran Contra hearings. Don't you know that just "deleting" something doesn't necessarily make it go away? Particularly in the case of a Google, which replicates data continuously to multiple datacenters.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
buy.com bribed me into trying Google Checkout with some ultra-cheap Kingston SD cards that were almost free after the Google Checkout discount. I placed my order, they got my money, I got my SD cards. It was a pretty straightforward transaction. So either I was among the few lucky ones or the people with complaints were among the few unlucky ones.
Here is the first page customers get when using Paypal as a payment gateway.
Is it so hard to find the non paypal account option ?
Also, notice the writing at the bottom of the page - Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom as an electronic money institution.
Just for completeness, here is the second page you get to if you choose non paypal. Oh, seems like that's pretty straightforward too. Maybe you're just a troll.
Has anyone used it to buy a blowup doll or dildo yet ?
Maybe some anal beads ?
Given Googles' track record with saving information about people, I can't help but wonder how that would go.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I'm a merchant and have set up service with Google Checkout. They've been pretty good to me so far and I've had no customer complaints. There were some integration problems in the beginning, but we've worked through those.
I love the fact that they temporarily dropped all fees as a promotion. PayPal still has more features, but Google's slowly adding more.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
Don't forget some of Google's totally forgotten stuff, such as GooglePages, which is close to ridiculous.
How is my comment redundant?
I challenge the moderator who did this to reply AC and tell me exactly which comment I duplicated. There is no other comment that addresses the poor quality of Google's customer service in regards to arbitrarily calling an actual bank a "virtual money" bank.
Seriously, basic reading comprehension tests should be given before points are handed out.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
: Well nice try FUD man. Here is the first page customers get when using Paypal as a payment gateway. Is it so hard to find the non paypal account option ?
:Also, notice the writing at the bottom of the page - Authorised and Regulated by the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom as an electronic money institution.
:Just for completeness, here is the second page you get to if you choose non paypal. Oh, seems like that's pretty straightforward too.
:Maybe you're just a troll.
Mmm... And I don't suppose it occurred to you that, since I clearly mentioned that I used them "a while back", PayPal may have changed their website/process since then?
I don't recall PayPal's legal status in the UK back then, but I was discussing the "your money is safe with PayPal"-type guarantees (not their legal obligations) which only applied to US customers at the time.
Maybe you're right; as I said, it was a couple of years ago (or so) that I used PayPal. Though I'm still sceptical until I've seen the whole payment process for myself, and I'm not inclined to waste any more of my time on it.
Feel free to check my comment history for troll-like behaviour if you like; I doubt you'll find much.
I note that your homepage is a commercial website that uses PayPal as its payment system. If we're throwing accusations about, I'd say you have a vested interest in PayPal not looking bad.
Personally, I still won't touch them with a barge pole; others can judge for themselves.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
the plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
I bought something through Google Checkout from a vendor I've been buying from for years, never had any trouble with them.
Despite my clear indication of the "don't spam me" preference, I started getting regular, frequent, promotional mailings.
The "stop getting mail from this merchant" thing didn't work.
Google's support desk didn't respond to queries.
The merchant couldn't do anything about it, since they have no control; they can forward mail to Google for "our customers", but that's it.
Google's only "unsubscribe" option is "prevent any messages, whether they're order-related or not, sent by this merchant, from reaching me."
Pretty much never gonna use that again, believe me. They don't allow you to opt out of purely promotional bulk mailings without completely severing all contact. If you later use their system to buy from a merchant, then you are immediately back on ALL the promotional stuff for that merchant, because you were never actually removed from the list; they were just blocking mail to you from that merchant. You can't have a way to communicate, without being spammed.
Will they fix it? I don't know. After multiple spams and heroic efforts to get anyone in the checkout group to do anything, I did eventually stop receiving mail, but so far as I know, they have no plans to fix the underlying system.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Google wants to own the Internet advertising game. Currently, their CPC (cost per click) offering is dominant but they have to continue expanding, and that means offering new products that fix the flaws with CPC, such as click fraud. The one totally fraud-proof advertising method is CPA: Cost Per Action/Aquisition. Basically, if you buy Bingo Card Creator (my little software program) after you click on my AdWords ad, I pay Google, say, $5. I don't pay them $.05 every time someone clicks on the ad anymore.
What does this have to do with Checkout? Without Checkout, Google has no way to know if I consumated the sale or not. "Uh, no, Google, sorry... my sales this month were only 2 units. Here's a check for $10. A pleasure as always, please show my ads next month." But my sales were actually 100 units, so I just screwed them out of $490 in revenue... and there is no way they can know. But if Google gets me to use Checkout, then they can roll out a CPA program at their leisure, and force me to use Checkout to offer the program. If I'm already using Checkout, this isn't a problem -- just like Analytics paves the way for AdWords, Checkout paves the way for gCPA. Thats a chicken and egg problem, so they're working on artificial egg production: getting customers to sign up for Checkout by offering $10 off a purchase for opening an account, getting sellers to sign up for Checkout by offering free payment processing through the end of 2007, etc.
Is it working? Anecdotally, not yet. I started offering Checkout a week ago and *all* of my customers who have used it opened their account specifically to buy my software (Google's fraud prevention system will list how long an account has been opened when the order is placed -- mine were all "0 days"). I guess Google could count that as a win though, considering I'm now in the system ready to start using CPA when it becomes available, and they've now got another dozen users with their credit cards on file at the Googleplex, who are now available to buy from any other Checkout-enabled merchant without putting up with the overly long checkout process again.
Incidentally, if you want to see my little slice of e-commerce, http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ . I integrate both the Paypal and Google options into my shopping cart. I guarantee you, if my users (elementary schoolteachers) can get through the Google UI, anybody can. I personally feel that its far inferior to Paypal but offer both as an option because a) some people hate Paypal and won't use them and b) hey, if I can save a couple hundred a year on Paypal fees, that money goes directly into my pocket.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I actually got surveyed and I'm one of the people that gave Google Checkout a poor rating. I had used it about 10 times over the holidays to take advantage of the promotions. I purchased Zelda for the Wii from Buy.com. Google sent me an e-mail the very next day saying the item had shipped but clearly Buy.com's site said the item was "Sent to Warehouse" for a over a week. I finally had it and canceled the item, to which I received a very quick e-mail saying I can't cancel shipped items. Checked the status and still "Sent to Warehouse", about 2hrs later it finally send "Shipped" and they sent me an e-mail saying it had shipped... A bit shady on Buy.com's part... Well now the story takes a downhill turn. I live in a brand new section of a previously built complex. The UPS driver had NO idea where my building was and returned it to Buy.com saying the address was wrong. Buy.com received it as can be clearly seen on the UPS tracking page. I contacted them for a refund, for which they told me I needed an RMA number. It took 3 back and forths for them to understand the issue. Well almost 2 weeks went by before I realized that I didn't have my money refunded to me. So I contacted Buy.com (all of this is via Google Checkout's Contact Buyer), to which they could only tell me they were looking into the issue. So I had enough and contacted Google through their ONLY means of contact... a crappy interface web form. They sent me an e-mail which just had my rant to Google then a copy of the Google Receipt and it was sent to Buy.com's plain support page. This got ignored for a day so I did it again... and again... every day of the week. NEVER got anything else from Google. Buy.com finally wrote me an e-mail saying my case had been already escalated, to calm down and they'd contact me when they had an answer. A few more days went by and Google sent me a survey for how they did to resolve my issue. Which I told them was terrible. Buy.com never refunded me a dime after 3 weeks of receiving the product back. I printed everything out, went to the bank and issued a charge back. Google then had the nerve to send me an e-mail threatening me to charge my card for ALL promo's I had gotten on ALL my orders. THEN this survey came along... Now you can guess why I gave them a poor rating.
I'm switching. Paypal has no compelling advantage and treats customers and vendors like crap (IMO).
I think I have once had this happen to me. Since all I was buying was an ebook, I simply entered a random US address that I pulled from a website. This worked fine.
So in reality, they accepted non-US cards just fine. They did not accept non-US addresses - even for a download able item.
I have observed a few things about my european VISA card on american sites: All they are able to verify is the card number, expiry date and the 3 digit security number. I am able to enter completely random information for all other fields, including the name field (the one they always ask to be spelled exactly like on the card).
In fact, I often have to enter wrong information, as my address include non english characters, and many american websites are apparently still made by people that live in a 7 bit ASCII world.
You can't even use it to buy porn!
...and then whine when they cancel the transaction because it's against the TOS.
I've used both Google Checkout and PayPal without any problems. Maybe I'm just one of the few who doesn't spend a ton of cash everyday on the web though.
I had to interface our merchant site with Google checkout and I was pretty dissapointed in the way the API was written, and the way it worked in general .. especially with customer feedback. A customer would pretty much have to 'request action on the account' which would then use google's system to e-mail a tech contact at our company saying 'hey! you have a message! go check it out' instead of supplying the message itself. All e-mail addresses were hidden and it was a real hassle to get a hold of a real person to discuss order issues. Google also had a special order status called 'Cancelled by Google'. I thought to myself, why would Google go about cancelling customers' orders? Lastly, once we got everything working in the sandbox and we deployed, none of the production pricing logic worked like the sandbox. It took us 2 days to correct the undocumented enhancements to the production environment. I held google in the highest regards before my experiences with them, and now I view them as just another online company.
well sure, but anytime I use my credit card a vendor could theoretically be saving that information indefinitely. However, if I'm not able to access my saved credit data myself, it makes it that much less likely that others can. Many websites are starting to save customer credit info for convenience, and I suppose that's fine as an option, but it should be something that you opt into rather than are roped into.
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Yes that's true. However, the *facts* remain - your post spreads misinformation
No, it was a correct representation of my personal experience, which I clearly pointed out was "a while back".
As for you not knowing what the current situation viz Paypal is
The current *legal* situation; I don't know if they had a UK subsidiary at that time, and what (if any) UK legal obligations they had back then.
well maybe you shouldn't post on a subject where you know nothing about the current situation
So if I have a bad experience with a company, I shouldn't mention it later on because the company *might* have changed?
Nope; too bad. This is how reputations- both good and bad- are formed. If a company like PayPal gets a bad reputation (for valid reasons), which my experience confirmed, they have to work to change that. It might teach other businesses a lesson, and anyway, people have a right to be sceptical.
at least make allowance in your post for the fact that things might have changed.
You could say that about any complaint. I made clear that my experience was "a while back"; people can judge how valid it is in today's context. As I said, my experience was that I'd heard from numerous sources that PayPal sucked. I cut it some slack and gave it a chance, and it still sucked.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Someone marked this as a troll. Maybe it was a billionaire who didn't like my criticism of billionaires losing control of their lives? Certainly no one can argue with what I say is my experience with PayPal.
Or maybe someone who likes U.S. government violence didn't like this: "U.S. government violence in Iraq caused more violence, not peaceful democracy."