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Google Re-Refunds Video Purchases
holymodal writes "In a new post to the Google blog Bindu Reddy, the Google Video product manager, admits that only offering refunds via Google Checkout was a bad idea: 'We should have anticipated that some users would see a Checkout credit as nothing more than an extra step of a different (and annoyingly self-serving) kind. Our bad.' Google now plans to issue customers a full credit card refund, while allowing them to keep the Checkout credit and extending the life of purchased videos another six months."
This is one thing I do respect Google (and a pitiful few other companies) for - admitting mistakes. So many hassles and PR disasters could be averted by just admitting you FUBARed and are willing to make amends. Hell, our foreign policy could learn from that, even.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Granted. They probably just weren't thinking about a possible negative reaction. Using Google Checkout for refunds makes sense because they no longer have to worry about expired or cancelled credit cards, etc. Not to mention, by keeping the money all in house, it would cost them less. They probably figured all the Google Fanboys were already using Checkout anyway. :) At least they admit they screwed up. And keeping BOTH refunds? Wow. Extremely generous.
Well, they have a point that Checkout credits would entail fewer steps, but I think Google tried to avoid a bit of work here as how I understand it, with Checkout credits, the Google Video users themselves have to make sure the refund gets to them, but with the credit card refund, Google has to make sure everyone gets their refund.
Still, they admitted their mistake and corrected it, which is good.
However since Google is now refunding the money they paid, I dont see it as a big deal anymore.
I work for the e-commerce section of a company that has an international online store (of bits and bytes, not physical products). The effort to add an additional country vastly exceeds that to check somebody's country and deny them access. We're trying (hard) to support more countries and payment methods, but it's not trivial at all.
Problems range from standard internationalization issues that anybody selling software overseas encounters to legal trade limits (usually not something that can be legally circumvented, and yes we're a US company). The most common significant problem is handling payment types. In the US we only have a few credit/debit card providers (less than 5, depending on your definition of "major). What's more, it's usually worth more for us (and less effort) to support the minority payment methods here in the US since this is the primary region where we're known. Internationally, the number of payment methods rapidly becomes quite extreme, and each one requires setting up the client-side support for the necessary authentication data and server-side infrastructure to handle payment authorization with each provider. This is, of course, after price adjustments and exchange rates are taken into account. There's a lot more I didn't even understand - I work on one small project that's one part of a fairly large team - but your complaint that you were unable to purchase online because you "needed an American credit card" doesn't surprise me in the least. Adding each additional payment method/provider adds a lot of cost to the project.
As a rule, companies make as much money as they can. Thinking things like "Limiting your availability geographically is harder than just doing nothing. They walk the extra mile to have _less_ customers?" is a clear sign that you don't know what is involved. I didn't either until a meeting a month or so back; as an American, my credit/debit cards have always been accepted internationally... but most of the names and icons of cards accepted by overseas ATMs and such are completely unknown to me; nothing here in the US accepts them because it's simply too much effort for the level of reward. I'm sure it's worth a bit more to online stores, but it's still a long road for relatively little economic reward most of the time.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...