Adam McFarland

It’s easy to become jaded and begin to dislike your customers for asking you the same questions over and over again. In a way, who can blame you: 99% of the interactions with customers that most businesses have are repetitive and don’t do much to make you a better business owner. Then - every once in a while - someone comes along and gives you a simple idea that’s so obvious you kick yourself and say “duh, why wasn’t that already on our to-do list?”

The other day in the comments field of a Tastefully Driven order someone said: “please include a card saying ‘Happy Birthday - Love Patty and John’”. My first thought was we don’t do that. Then we had a conversation and realized that not only should we do it, we should make it a policy to allow our customers to do it for free with any order.

See, Detailed Image’s holiday season is the summer, when people obsessively care for their cars. In the past it hasn’t really been a traditional holiday-driven e-commerce site like most. As volume has picked up we’ve become increasingly aware of holiday-specific marketing. We also quickly realized that many of the products on Tastefully Driven are great gifts and that TD needs to capitalize on holiday orders to be successful. We were planning on starting with Father’s Day next month but hadn’t really talked strategy yet.

This order sparked that discussion, and it became pretty obvious that allowing people to include a custom card at no charge was a no-brainer decision. We figure that as long as we do a good job making our customers aware of this service they will take advantage of it on holidays/birthdays. I think we’ll also probably give them the option of having it shipped without the receipt in case they don’t want the recipient to know the price.

Yesterday morning I ran to CVS and picked up 10 blank cards for ~$6. We decided that was too expensive to pay for a card if we were going to offer this for free. After looking around online at blank cards, we decided it would be far cheaper to use our wholesale printing account where we can get 1,000 custom tent cards (3.5″ X 4″ with a fold in the middle) for $54.99, or ~5 cents a card. Below are the designs that we’re having printed up. We will then hand-write the message on the inside of the card…check that, Mike will hand-write the message because the rest of us write like a five year old.

Like most companies we use our business credit cards quite a bit. In turn, we get quite a few rewards points which result in all sorts of gift certificates. A little over a month ago we got a $40 gift certificate to NFLShop.com. No one else really wanted it, and there was a DVD for $39.99 that I did want, so my partners were nice enough to let me use it. I placed the order and when it arrived it was the wrong DVD.

Freeze it right here. In this situation, here’s what we would do: have the customer ship us the item back, immediately re-ship the correct item, apologize profusely, and throw something extra in for free/give them a credit towards a future purchase. If they need the order by a certain date (say to do a detail) we will work with them to overnight them their order…on occasion we even let them keep the wrong order and expedite the correct order. It’s our mistake, and we go above and beyond to make it right with the customer. It’s what any person or business should do: apologize and make amends.

So what did NFLShop do when I called? They told me to ship the item back, but that they only accept returns (not exchanges). They said they would refund my credit card and I could place the order again. Only one problem - I paid via gift certificate. Couldn’t they just ship me the correct DVD once they got my return? Nope - they had to re-issue me a new gift certificate which took about six weeks. A few days ago I got my new gift certificate. Yesterday I placed my order again, and I should finally get my DVD almost 2 months after the initial order.

Hey NFLShop - great job turning a simple exchange into a complex process. Even more kudos for making no effort whatsoever to correct your mistake.

Why do some companies have such a hard time with simple business policies that should seemingly be so intuitive?

I don’t much mention SportsLizard or the Price Guide anymore, but it is still alive and kicking.  I’ve got it down to a science where I probably only spend less than 5 hours a week to maintain the site.  The Price Guide is at about 30,000 users but - because of our inline help and FAQ - requires very little customer service.  Premium accounts are only a small fraction of that, but we still make over $1k/month on them for doing essentially nothing.

However, this morning my biggest SL nightmare became reality - the Price Guide software mysteriously stopped working.  A bunch of cancellations followed, as did an email from a loyal user who has priced 11,238 items using our Price Guide (yup - he’s run 11,238 searches!).

This was at about 8:30 AM while I was sitting in a Starbucks.  I had planned to do some relaxing work and then meet my cousin for lunch…but all of a sudden I was in panic mode.  The application relies on a lot of things to be working right, most notably our syncing with Google Base, and I had no clue where to start.

I thought Google might have disabled our API keys…nope.

I thought someone might have hacked the SL database and screwed with the integration of SL and Base results….nope.

I thought that eBay, NAXCOM, and Beckett could have all stopped listing items on Google Base (essentially killing the service)….nope.

Then I tried a pre-launch beta version that I made that spits out results as a text file without any graphs or a fancy UI.  Amazingly that worked.  So I went line-by-line through my code and compared the beta version  to the live version.  After about an hour I figured out that a filter I had put in to weed out items returned with a $0 price was no longer supported (correctly at least) by Google Base and was throwing the results off.  The same search would go from 30 legit results to 500 with the filter removed.  Very rarely are items listed at $0 anyway - I just put that in there as a redundancy - so I removed it and everything began to work fine again.

The last time I successfully used the Price Guide was a week ago, so it looks like it was in bad shape anywhere from 36 hours to 1 week.

Now the hard part - damage control:

• At 8:30 I had immediately placed a notification in red on the Price Guide page saying something to the effect of “We’re experiencing technical difficulties, we’re working to resolve them ASAP, we apologize for the inconvenience”.   I took that down once I was certain I had solved the problem.
• I emailed that uber-loyal user back who initially alerted me of the error. I refunded his most recent payment and offered him a free premium account for life.
• I emailed everyone who had canceled in the past week apologizing for the inaccurate results and offering them the same free premium account for life.
• I wrote a post on the SL blog (which is auto-emailed to newsletter subscribers as well) notifying everyone that the issue had been resolved and extending the same free premium account for life offer to anyone who I did not email that also experienced troubles with the Price Guide during the past week.

Whew.  That was a stressful morning.

As much as it sucked, it allowed me to re-familiarize myself with the app I built almost a year ago.  More importantly, it created an opportunity for me to show my customers how much I care about them and their experience with the Price Guide.   It also gave me a chance to show that we address our issues rapidly - within hours of being notified of them…even on a Saturday - and with a candid, honest, and genuinely remorseful attitude.

No one wants to have technical snafu’s like this, but when presented with one you’ve got to make the best of a bad situation.

While it’s on my mind, I want to reflect on how I think client work can be done correctly.  By ‘correctly’ I mean being happy with the work you’re doing, not being over-worked, making plenty of profit, and satisfying your clients.  It can be done - I know people who do it - but it certainly wasn’t for myself or Pure Adapt.
Based on my experiences, these are the rules you should strictly adhere to if you want to do client work right:

• Charge what you’re worth.  What are you worth?  Do some math:  if you want to make $100k you need to make around $2k/week, which means you need to make around$50/hr for 40 hours/week.  That $50/hr has to cover every second you’re working - including answering phones and emails, time spent researching and preparing quotes, time required to market your business, and that 5-10 hours/week when random unexpected stuff gets in the way of getting work done.  The best way to do this is to charge by the hour and inflate the price a bit (say $100/hour in our example).  Unfortunately most people - us included - charge by the project and don’t account for the extra 50% of time we spend doing support for the project, which of course drives down our hourly rate and makes the work not worthwhile.  I’d lean towards charging hourly if I did it again, but if not it becomes even more important to….
• Have clearly outlined terms.  Our lawyer drew up arbitration and indemnification clauses for us, which covered our ass legally.  But that’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m referring to:  exactly what the client will get, exactly how many revisions they get, and exactly how frequently they can contact you.  Yup - I’d do the unheard of and place limits on how often they could contact me.  This saves me time, and forces them to coherently convey their thoughts. Ten rambling emails a day turn into one well-thought email.    This goes hand in hand with….
• Have set hours.  I have gotten phone calls on Christmas, Easter, on Sunday mornings at 6 AM, at midnight on a Saturday night….and those are just ones that come to mind.  If you let them, clients will call you 24 x 7 x 365.  Don’t let them.  In your terms, make sure you say “I answer emails and phone calls M-F 10 AM - 4 PM and Saturday from 9 AM - 11 AM”.  Or whatever hours work for you, but you get the idea.  We never committed to doing this, and it hurt us.  Some people will abuse your terms, so you have to be willing to….
• Fire bad clients.  When you make the decision to do so, don’t let them talk you out of it.  If they have caused you so much stress that you would rather NOT make their money just so you don’t have to deal with them, then you absolutely need to let them go.   As you get better at quoting out clients, you’ll learn to….
• Turn down clients.  If they don’t meet your standards, or if something doesn’t feel right, don’t go ahead with the job.  Just tell them you don’t think you’re a good fit for each other.  In my experiences, this makes them want to work with you more and they ‘beg’ for you to work with them.  Don’t give in.  If you’re turning down imperfect clients, you better…..
• Have a way of generating a ton of leads.  When we applied ourselves, we were actually pretty good at this.  Things that worked for us:
  • Have a website with a lot of information about all of your services.  The more content, the better you’ll get indexed and the better you’ll convert readers into clients.
  • Start a blog, preferably about your industry.  This very blog has accounted for probably 40% of the clients I had.  If people get to know you personally before they contact you, there’s no ’sale’ - they just contact you with a desire to work with you.
  • Buy local business leads.  We paid ~$200 for 13 weeks of leads.  They email a CSV file of every new business registered in your area.  We then sent each lead a post card…and then a follow-up post card.  These are people that NEED websites, so it’s a no-brainer.  Including postage we spent about $1 per lead.  For less than $1k/year you’ll easily make your money back.  The best part is that it’s easily scalable to the ENTIRE country by just buying more leads!
  • Work Craigslist.  At a minimum, post in your area.  We tried paying a posting service to post throughout the country for us.  They did an OK job and brought in some OK leads, but we didn’t commit to it long enough to do it correctly.  One thing is for sure:  lots of people every day who need sites are looking on CL.
  • Incentivize current clients to give you referrals.  You can’t MAKE them give you referrals, and if you’re doing a good job they’ll probably do it anyway, but a little push can make a huge difference.  Send them newsletters frequently updating them on your business, and every single time make them an offer if they refer you a new client:  a year of free hosting, 2 free hours of consulting, $300 off of a redesign, etc.
  • Participate in your local Chamber of Commerce.  Go where the successful business are, and all successful businesses are members of their local CoC.

  This is all a lot of work, so make sure you….

• Hire contractors.  Your local college is FILLED with computer science students who need part-time jobs and don’t want to work at the local TGI Friday’s.  Albany is filled with colleges, and I’m sure your city or metro area is as well.  Using Craigslist you can usually find a handful of sub-contractors to try out.  Even if they spend the majority of their time generating leads or doing basic maintenance work, the $15/hr you pay them allows you to spend your time on the $100/hr work we mentioned earlier.  And finally, to do all of this right you should….
• Avoid being a hybrid company like Pure Adapt.  I’m not saying don’t work on some side projects, but if you decide to try to make a run at making serious money off of one of your sites then you might as well ditch clients.  You’ll NEVER want to work on your clients projects ever again.  Your projects are always better, more important, and of course more fun.   You’ll begin to resent your clients, and everything will fall apart.

It’s been eight days since I last posted. Normally I try to post every few days, but the combination of Thanksgiving and being busier than normal has led me to procrastinate on this post for a while. Anyway, I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately on how to make Pure Adapt a great company, primarily for two reasons:

1. I’m in the middle of reading Good to Great, and it’s one of the few business books I’ve ever read that actually makes me think (as opposed to saying “duh, that’s so obvious” throughout the entire thing).
2. Our November is going waaaaay better than we ever anticipated. Mike and I are quickly getting backed up with jobs for Faceup-Sites, and more importantly Detailed Image is having a record-breaking month…we’re talking 3X revenue from what George and Greg did last November combined with the fact that it’s our largest month in one of the traditionally slowest months for auto-detailing supplies (the cumulative impact of our new SE friendly site combined with being first to market with a new product).

One of the things that Jim Collins, author of Good to Great talks about is the “hedgehog concept” where to become a great company you need to have equal parts of:

• What you are deeply passionate about
• What you can be best in the world at
• What drives your economic engine

And after reflecting on that, I had an epiphany of sorts: we are not a web development company (at least in the traditional sense). Our programming skills are adequate to accomplish our business goals, but if you put us in a programming competition with any other four person web development company in the world we’d finish last. There are however, two things that we are passionate about, can be best in the world at, and are currently accounting for 90%+ of our revenue:

1. We are a great operations company. The primary reason we overhauled the Detailed Image site was because of the back-end automation. Most e-commerce sites have several steps from purchase to shipment (charging out the customers credit card, creating invoices, entering the order into an accounting system, creating a shipping label, etc) and we have all of that 100% automated - saving hours of time and eliminating human error. On the other side, Mike has become so efficient at WordPress, that Faceup-Sites is able to provide our clients with search engine friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and easy-to-update sites in about 1/5 the time it used to take us. We charge less, and we still profit more. Other examples: we have an internal Wiki where we document everything we do so all partners can do any process at any time (this was the idea I got from Anthony from Xonatek web development…don’t want to take credit for an idea that isn’t mine). I also built an internal project management system to organize all of our clients and their account information. Another good example is setting up our payroll service to automatically direct deposit our checks and pay our taxes for us. I think you get the idea. But I ask you: how many ~1 year old companies owned by four 25 year olds have these systems in place?
2. We are great at marketing/sales/customer service (yea I kind of lump these things together). Prior to forming Pure Adapt, George and Greg built Detailed Image on sheer will - they sponsored forums and taught others how to detail, and in doing so were able to pitch their products. The secondary reason we overhauled the DI site was for the SEO impact, and now (only a few months later) that accounts for almost as much in sales as their direct sales approach. On the client side of things, Mike and I are closing 80%+ of our leads, mostly because we take the time to listen to the customer, put ourselves in their shoes, and suggest the solutions that fit their unique case the best. And for all of our sites we answer questions rapidly and never, ever attack customers…going above and beyond to make sure they know we care about their experience and want them to be treated fairly. Again, how many companies have the web marketing knowledge we do and combine that with exceptional sales and customer service?

A large part of why we’re good at these two things is because we all have an operations background, and we all have significant sales experience. None of us really have a programming background. This “realization” doesn’t much change our current position, but it does change the way I think of Pure Adapt in the years to come. I always pictured us creating a lot of web2.0 style sites, but that’s clearly the wrong approach. We’ll be in a warehouse/office by 1.1.2008 (we’re actively looking right now) and at that point we’ll start planning our next move. Rather than thinking of software or web apps, I think we’ll focus on growing our niche client services and creating more e-commerce platforms like Detailed Image. After all, we already have the shopping cart in place that gives us a huge competitive advantage on the front-end and the back-end, so it just makes sense to port that cart over to other sites and ship products from the same warehouse (saving on boxes, shipping costs, etc).

Finally, as we approach our one year anniversary, it seems like everything is becoming clear. Over 90% of our revenue comes from those things, so it makes sense to spend 90%+ of our time on becoming great at e-commerce and client work. I’ll always spend the remaining 10% of my time creating Music-Alerts-type sites because they’re fun and that’s how I advance my programming skills, but the difference now is that I want to spend my time working on making us great and not making just enough money so I can create crazy web apps and try to become rich by hitting a home run with one of them. I *think* we just figured out how to become a great company. Now we just have to do it

Finally, five days later my inbox was flooded with the PayPal subscription payments. From what I can tell they’ve back-billed all of the customers from Thursday until this morning, and normalcy has returned to my world. Thankfully this fiasco is over.

Now comes the questions: why did PayPal wait several days before acknowledging the problem? Why wasn’t their customer service team fully aware of the issue? Why did they wait until yesterday (4 days late) to post an announcement on their blog? Why wasn’t there an announcement on the homepage so everyone could immediately be aware of the issue? And why didn’t they send an email out to all of the people the problem impacted?

For SportsLizard, it was no big deal. An inconvenience - yes. But we got our money. However, there are several people I’ve talked with that rely on payments and had their cash flow hurt significantly (a few hundred $4.99 subscriptions is nothing compared to people with a few thousand $99.99 subscriptions). I’ve also seen comments from people (these ones from the PayPal blog) that have had subscriptions cancelled by PayPal without their consent:

Ummm, it’s worse than that. You are now cancelling my subscriptions. As far as I know this is not reverseable. Your system isn’t collecting the money for a subscription and now it is cancelling the subscriptions. I have had 12 cancellation just this morning. That’s more than I usually have in a couple weeks.

And…

My web hosting firm has been unable to collect our subscription payments since yesterday. There’s a lot of angry customers too because they’re reporting their subscriptions have appeared to have been cancelled.

And…

I as well have had 5 cancelations over the period of Sep 1st 2007 - Sep 2nd 2007. 1 of these customers has messaged me back, asking why I have canceled the subscription. I pointed him to this website, and he said in his own words.
“Ah that figures, paypal at it again”
Good job guys…

Oooof.  You better fix that PayPal or risk getting slapped with a class action lawsuit.

On a much more positive note, the Price Guide passed the 15,000 registered user mark over the weekend! This is a huge accomplishment for us. We launched May 3, so it has only been live for 4 months…an average of nearly 4k/month! The first month was slow, so if we keep up that 4k/month rate that it’s been going at since then we’d sign up 48k users in the first year! I think once you start talking about having 100k+ registered users for something you enter a whole new stratosphere. On top of that, traffic and ad revenue has more than doubled each month, and again I feel like the site is pushing the limits of a “small” site and has the potential within the next year to become a very very profitable mid-size site.

Now comes the big launch of the Detailed Image site we’ve been working on since June.  That comes this week, and I can’t wait to get that monster up and running.  As always there will be a few hiccups, but once it’s on cruise control our company will really be operating at close to 100% efficiency, something we’ve all been pushing hard for.

It is now day 4 of the PayPal Subscription disaster that has been crippling small businesses all over the world. When I wrote that post yesterday I couldn’t find a documented case of the problem anywhere online. I decided I was going to social bookmark my post on every popular social bookmarking site to try to get the word out. I also sent it to places like TechCrunch (although they credited someone else with the story…no biggie, just happy it got out) and sent it to The PayPal Blog.

Within hours, my post was #1 on Google for the search term “PayPal Subscriptions Down” (via Digg of course):

Thankfully, we have some answers. At 6:51 PM I was contacted by someone at PayPal:

Dear Adam McFarland,

My name is Leslie and I am a member of PayPal’s Executive Escalations team. It is my understanding that you expressed concerns on the PayPal Blog regarding subscription payments that you did not receive. I apologize for the concern this matter has caused. You are correct that there is a known concern regarding subscription payments and we are working to resolve that matter. Unfortunately, we do not have an estimated time of resolution but we are working to resolve this matter as quickly as possible. I will continue to monitor the situation and we will contact you when the matter has been resolved.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again at crme@paypal.com. My direct number is XXX-XXX-XXXX if you wish to contact me directly.

Sincerely,
Leslie
Executive Escalations
PayPal, an eBay Company

And later on I saw this on the PayPal Developer Blog:

Paypal wants to notify merchants that subscriptions are experiencing some delays and that will be back to normal around September 5, 2007 (Wednesday) or September 6, 2007 (Thursday). Please be assured that no subscriptions will be missed, just that the payout will be delayed.

We apologize for any impact caused by this incident.

Sincerely,
PayPal Merchant Technical Support Team

Contacting PayPal

Whew. We can all breathe a sigh of relief. My biggest question was answered - all of our customers will be back-billed and we will not lose any business. Nice to see PayPal FINALLY comment on the issue…something that should have been done on August 30th! I want to thank everyone who commented, emailed, and posted themselves to help spread the word. It’s nice to see a collective group of people harness the power of the web to shed light on a bad situation and some horrible customer service.

Now let’s see if the service is ACTUALLY up and running by Wednesday or Thursday.

For a large portion of our websites we use PayPal to receive payments. Sometimes we use them exclusively and sometimes we offer it as an alternative payment option. Either way, we rely on them quite heavily as I’m sure a lot of businesses do.

Keep in mind while reading all of this that yesterday was my birthday and the whole experience was that much worse because it was supposed to be a relaxing and happy day. It’s also no secret that PayPal has been in the process of upgrading their site the past few weeks so there’s clearly a possible explanation for any unexpected errors.

Here we go:

For the SportsLizard Price Guide we use PayPal to manage the subscriptions (free for the first 7 days and $4.99/month thereafter). We have hundreds of paying subscribers, so every morning my inbox is flooded with You have received a subscription payment emails from PayPal. Thursday morning there were no such emails. Odd. So I went into my PayPal account to investigate. Without sifting through all of our users, I was able to quickly identify five or six payments that should have been made that morning. For those who don’t know - when a user signs up for a PayPal subscription they are automatically billed on payment days and the money is withdrawn from their account.

So I did what anyone else would do. I contacted customer service. Thursday night (8/30) around 10 PM I submitted a request for PayPal to look into the subscriptions. I included several specific subscription numbers for them to investigate. Here’s what I got back at 10:58 PM.

Dear Adam McFarland,

Hello, my name is Ronda and I am happy to assist you with your questions regarding the issues you are experiencing with your subscription payments that you receive.

After further review of your account, I can see that you have received subscription payments for Aug. 30, 2007 however, 5 payments have been cancelled. It looks like 4 were cancelled by the buyer and one was cancelled by you.

Usually there is a problem with a subscription because a payment fails.
Failures may occur for a variety of reasons. For example, a payment may fail because of insufficient funds.

If a payment fails, either the subscription can be canceled or the payment can be reattempted. If the Subscription Terms call for reattempts, payments are reattempted three days after the failure date. If it fails a second time, we will try once more five days later. If it fails on this last attempt, the subscription is canceled.

Note: eChecks are automatically re-presented only once and three days after we notify the user that it failed due to insufficient funds.

To avoid overlapping payments, reattempts do not occur if another payment for the same subscription is scheduled within 14 days of the failed payment.

A notification email is sent to you and your subscriber if a payment fails.

I understand your frustration regarding this matter and apologize for any inconvenience it might have caused you.

Sincerely,
Ronda
PayPal Community Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

Yes, there were several subscriptions cancelled.  No, I did not receive any payments from those subscriptions (if they are cancelled, they aren’t billed…duh). But there are also several ACTIVE subscriptions that were not cancelled and should have been billed. When the next day began (8/31) and there were more missing payments, I replied with the following:

Hi,

Thanks for replying. Please investigate these subscriptions that are NOT cancelled. All were supposed to be paid either yesterday or today, and have not been. Please let me know when these payments will be deposited.

{SUBSCRIPTION #’s HERE}

All of these are ACTIVE and say “Next Payment Date: Aug. 30, 2007″. Or “Next Payment Date: Aug. 31, 2007″

Thanks,

Adam

At this point I was so stressed that I had to pick up the phone and call. Why did PayPal all of a sudden stop charging my customers? Everything had been working fine since we launched in May! We haven’t touched the source code in well over a month.

At 10:39 AM on 8/31 I picked up the phone and began what would be a 20:12 call. The service rep was a nice guy and I tried not to be too mean to him (after all it’s not his fault). However, it took him an inordinate amount of time to understand the problem. Finally, I walked him through a subscription. I gave him the S# and also the customer email address.

I said, “take a look at the ‘Next Payment Date’ on the subscription”.

He replied “it looks fine - the next payment is due on August 30th…would you like to change that?”

“You do realize that August 30th was YESTERDAY don’t you?”

At this point he recognized the problem (probably 18 minutes into the 20 minute call). He then told me that there could be an issue with that particular customers credit card or account and that’s why he wasn’t charged.

“But I also have a list of at least 10 more customers that this happened to yesterday…and I have hundreds of other subscribers and have never had this problem before yesterday,” I replied. Not to mention, I also receive a ‘Subscription Payment Failed’ email whenever a payment does not go through.

At this point he was clueless. I asked if I could give him a list of subscription numbers to look into, and if he could assure me that the customers would be billed if in fact it turned out that they should have been.  He gave me no such assurance - he told me to hang up and email in the list. Which I did (I literally copied and pasted the previous email).

Then I received this extremely unhelpful reply at 11:26 AM yesterday.

Dear Adam McFarland,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Hello my name is Joseph, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding the status of your subscription payments, and understand your frustration and concern over this issue. I am happy to assist you with your questions.

To find the current status of your Subscription and Recurring Payments, please follow these steps:….

And the rest of the email proceeded to tell me how to check the status of my subscriptions. Never mind I mentioned in the email that all of the subscriptions were active and should have been billed yesterday.

I replied at 12:05 AM:

Hi,

I have called and emailed several times and still have not gotten my question answered. I know how to check the status of the subscriptions!

All of the following are ACTIVE and should have been paid yesterday or today. Please investigate and let me know why they were not, and when they will be deposited. Considering that they are NOT cancelled and say “Next Payment Date: Aug 30, 2007″ which was YESTERDAY, I’d say that there is a problem on your end and it would be nice if you acknowledged that.

Here’s the list again:

{SUBSCRIPTION #’s HERE}

Adam

I was pretty upset (as you can tell from my tone in that email). I decided to drop it and go out for my birthday lunch with my cousin Alaina.

After returning, nothing had been solved so I picked up the phone again. This time I was determined to not get off until I got an answer. The call was made at 2:33 PM and lasted 44:33.

Again, the operator was very friendly but had trouble understanding the problem. I spent at least the first 20 minutes explaining how PayPal subscriptions work (she kept telling me that I didn’t invoice the customer and they probably hadn’t had a chance to pay yet). This was pretty frustrating. The idea of a PayPal subscription is not that complex and everyone in the company should understand that the consumer is auto-billed and the money removed from their account per the terms of the subscription.

Once she grasped that concept, I told her that I had a list of examples and asked if she would walk through each one with me. I showed her the same example as I did the previous operator and we went through the same banter as before.

Her: “it could just be a problem with this account, you should email that customer.”

Me: “But I have a whole list that this is happening to? And besides, I get an email when a subscription payment fails and I didn’t get any emails in this case.”

She tried to get me off the phone without a resolution. I said I needed to speak to a manager. That took about 10 minutes. Finally she returned and told me “there have been reports that other people are experiencing the same problem. Our programming team is aware of it and is working on a solution”. I pressed for more information - specifically whether or not they would be billing the missed subscriptions for me - but she didn’t have any answers. I thanked her for the help and hung up.

At approximately 3:15 PM, after wasting my entire day I FINALLY got an answer. Here’s what gets me: I understand that the majority of calls are questions that can be answered with cookie cutter replies and FAQs, but what if someone actually has a REAL PROBLEM to report? It doesn’t feel good to have rep after rep not believe you and not understand the problem even when you can show them the evidence.

And then to add salt to the wound. At 3:43 (a half hour after the rep on the phone admitted to the problem) I received this golden nugget:

Dear Adam McFarland,

Thank you for contacting PayPal. I apologize for the delay in responding to your inquiry. I understand how important this is to you, I have full attention on your account now and I will be glad to help you.

As per request, I have checked your PayPal account and I do not show here any active subscriptions at all. Actually Mr. McFarland, your list doesn’t match the cancelled subscriptions on your account.

Umm. Yes, that’s because my list was for ACTIVE subscriptions, of which there are HUNDREDS on my account. On top of that, you just admitted to me over the phone that there was an issue! Shouldn’t all of your reps know about the problem?

Now it is Saturday 9/1 and I missed another day of payments. The subscriptions in my account all look like this one (screenshot taken around 10 AM on 9/1):

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that August 30th is in the past. Yet it was like pulling teeth with PayPal just to get an admission of the problem. Still though, I haven’t heard back from them about what they are going to do. There’s no assurance that they will back-bill my customers. No assurance as to when my customers will begin being billed again.  I’m completely left hung out to dry.

If they don’t back-bill my customers, shouldn’t PayPal reimburse that money? I don’t think that I should have to contact each customer and manually bill them. That will tick them off, and they did nothing wrong. It’s unfortunate that PayPal doesn’t post issues like this somewhere on their site to control the damage.

The sad thing is - I still like PayPal overall. I want to continue to do business with them because I think they are the best option for our company in many cases. Sometime in the next few days I’ll do a post on how PayPal and other companies should handle their customer service, although in this case it seems pretty obvious. I personally answer 20+ customer service questions for our sites on a daily basis, and I’d say that PayPal broke every single golden rule (other than being polite…the reps were always very polite).  I wonder what the people over at The PayPal Blog would think about this?

Whew. What a horrible situation.  I’ll never forget this birthday.