Google Checkout Nightmare and the $126,000 phone call

I see from prbuckley's profile that this is probably related to the DODOcase, a fashion accessory for tech folks which has six week delivery time. Ahh, pieces are falling into place: 700 orders shipped out of a few thousand, some customers complained (love that tech induced ADHD), Google froze the money.<p>While it isn't immediately helpful to you, a little bit of craftiness here will kill two birds with one stone. First, <i>don't let orders queue</i>. Customers, particularly ADHD tech types, are <i>very</i> sensitive to shipping delays. Instead, if you don't have the inventory and you're at your (low) maximum queue size, turn off orders on the website.<p>The key, though, is how you do that. I'd highlight the scarcity/exclusivity angle and <i>play it to the hilt</i>. Come on, you're selling I-can't-believe-its-not-moleskin handmade in San Fransisco straight to Mac owners. This is a luxury status item. Tell folks that if they didn't buy in time, they're simply not worthy of your magical goodness. Then three weeks later, you produce some more, and open orders again. You will be stampeded, and have to close again within a day. Folks who didn't hear about it in time, well, not everybody can be cool enough to own this. (Every time you open up orders, expect a burst of Twitter/links/etc, as folks try to get in and then lament that they missed it again or primp to their friends that their faith has been rewarded.)<p>(I'd suggest making the batches distinguishable in some way -- any way, heck, you could just say "Our artists whispered the words 'Made in the second batch' over these" and that would have the desired effect on your target customer. Also, charge more.)

I love Google as much as the next guy, but how could a legitimate business that handles money not have a phone number to call to speak to a human to resolve this? It's absolutely ridiculous that they can threaten your livelihood and not have a human to talk to.<p>As bad as Paypal is, at least they offer live phone support. With the products I sell, Google Checkout and Paypal aren't options, so even with all the red tape you must go through to get a merchants account, I'd still rather do that than use Google Checkout/Paypal.

Billing prior to shipping is rapidly becoming an unacceptable practice. If you are billing prior to shipping and then taking 6 weeks to fill the order then you need to take a serious look at how you are doing business.<p>If your orders always take a lengthy amount of time to fill I would suggest immediately sending a "your item is on back order and you will not be billed until it ships" email with a link to an order cancellation page. This should drastically cut down on the complaints and ease the mind of those consumers who think you have billed them and are scamming them into waiting until the billing complaint period has expired.

Looks like your only course of action is to send them the tracking numbers (again?). For $126,000 it's worth taking the time to do it. You may find all the money in your bank account tomorrow.

frankly I'm shocked that Google still does such shitty customer support.<p>Sure Gmail, Search etc, I can understand that you can't supply customer service for a free service used by millions(many of whom will call you for the most trivial stuff).<p>But when you are dealing with people's money....surely you can afford $8-10 bucks an hour to give people proper customer support. It's not like google is some tiny startup which can be excused due to size, they are bigger than most corporations.<p>If you hold 6 figures of someone else's money, you better have a way for that person to talk to you.

When I was leaving from Paypal for an issue like yours (they still have 300$ of my money) I investigated on Google Checkout and read a lot of horror stories like yours.<p>I wish you to solve this and after that I suggest you to switch to Fastspring. They have really excellent customer support, that becomes very valuable when a lot of money are involved.

Get a letter sent from an established Mountain View-based law firm, i.e. one that would be known to Google's legal department. It'll cost you some bucks but it beats going out of business.

Wonder why Google needs to contact your buyers for confirmation? I thought they are the middle man should be transparent in the purchase process.

For the record, it states in their Seller Policy ( <a href="https://checkout.google.com/seller/policies.html" rel="nofollow">https://checkout.google.com/seller/policies.html</a> ) that you have to capture within 7 days and ship within 24 hours of capture.<p>I learned this the hard way when I presold books through Google Checkout. I mistakenly read the UK ToS which, unlike the US ToS, allowed preorders. Once we'd amassed more than $40k, they contacted us via email to let us know we had run afoul of their policy.<p>I pleaded with them to give me time to fulfill the orders, and to their credit, they did. They kept 100% of the funds until I sent them notification that I had shipped every package.<p>Nowadays, even though I only use them to process a couple thousand dollars per month, they are perpetually sitting on $1,000 of my funds as a protection against chargebacks/fraud. I was told that if I wanted that money, I had to close my account and wait 3 months for the funds to "clear". I've asked for the cap to be lowered, but they never bothered to respond.

Not sure if you saw the post on hacker news entitled: "Need to process payments?" -- <a href="http://ycombinator.posterous.com/need-to-process-payments" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.posterous.com/need-to-process-payments</a>, but you might wanna contact them once you get everything else sorted out. Good luck!

What would you do if you were me?

At your volume of sales, you really need to setup a merchant account for your business to process payments. Using middlemen like Google Checkout and Paypal and you are going to fall into problems.<p>I can help you get setup with your own MID with a liberal acquiring bank, send me an email ofcmanagement at gmail if you're interested.

$126,000 in two months...good work!

This reminds me of some paypal horror stories... not good. The approach patio11 suggests is the best one i guess.

So you say you've sent them tracking numbers, and they say you haven't? Are they lying, mistaken, or what?

Google checkout sounds worse than Paypal. I have both and right now have my own nightmare with them Customer claimed empty box sent for heavy item said wanted exchange, sent back replacement now claims wrong size. I used to call Paypal automotons but at least they people that you can talk to, it's so obvious what is going on. They say resolved then say customer not happy. Con artist is not happy. I am sure all the conartists know that it's a sure way to rip off people. !2 years in business no problems online with empty box, google checkout 6 months and first of a few problems with con artists, this by far the worst.<p>I am sure in your case , the ones that are con artists that have the request of receipt will say they did not receive. I guess what you should do is update all the tracking in the google checkout system to avoid any problems. Gee and I thought they were great at ebay live 2007 in Boston but they seem to be slipping down on the job. Ebay is now the payment king, bonanzle the best site for selling and google should stay with search. Creativity in business solutions is not their forte, neither are phones i guess. Losing steam and unhappy customers virally transmitted info people spreads fast..Paypal has lawsuits due to their way, I think there is no due process on google checkout either. They had better be careful and they definitely need a customer service line. I don't know how they think that they can operate without one!.

Google Checkout is terrible for pre-orders and things that do not ship within 5-7 days of authorization of card. I would definitely recommend NOT using Google Checkout for this type of business model, some research might have saved you the frustration.<p>I believe there might also be an issue with the legality of charging actually charging for the purchase prior to shipment. Most merchants will typically authorize the card, and then issue the capture transaction once a tracking number is availability.<p>This then will lead you to to the next issue that will be especially painful to deal with using Google Checkout: bad authorizations.<p>We have had scenarios where we authorized a card on a Tuesday, found out the item was backordered for a week and thus did not ship the item and attemp to issue the capture transaction until 8 days later.<p>With Google Checkout, a re-auth is needed after 7 days. Unfortunately you do not find out the re-auth failed until AFTER you have shipped the items (and then attempted to capture funds on the order). You are then out of luck on capturing any funds if you cannot contact the customer and get another form of payment.<p>Happy to discuss this further if you would like some advice.

Not related directly to the issue; but I have seen another issue that I wouldn't imagine being there in any payment processor. The ability to see all subscriptions in one place. The only way to stop google apps from charging my checkout account is to disable auto renew in the dashboard (won't help if I helped a friend buy a domain because he didn't have a credit card) or to remove the payment methods associated.

Aren't there any legal means to fight this battle? Consumer laws and other ways of enforcement. Perhaps <i></i>grellas<i></i> has a low-down on this?<p>The whole Aaron Greenspan mess (<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_172403.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...</a>) does not put me at ease.

One more thing, you might want to check if there is any "beta" label on Google Checkout sites.

I recognize this e-mail drafting scheme well. I also had very mixed experiences with Google Checkout. I finally found a workaround, but will try to avoid them in the future. Their 'support' is atrocious.

Try suing them in a small claims court - it's worked at least once before:<p><i>In the end, printed on a baby blue sheet of paper by the clerk's aging dot matrix printer, the judgment was actually entered for $761.00 total, due to the $40.00 court costs. I couldn't help but to smile in front of the judge.<p>"But it's not fair!" Google's paralegal protested. "What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?"</i><p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_172403.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...</a><p>(IANAL, etc)

Why not take one or two of the oldest payments Google is withholding and file a small claims lawsuit against Google as a test? If the courts allow the case to proceed and you win, then just batch up your claims and over time you can get all your money.<p>You will just have to be careful not to exceed the small claims lawsuit money award limits. Name Larry, Sergey, and Eric as the defendants if you really want to get Google's attention. Also, after you hit Google once or twice with a suit, they will probably get you all of your money quickly.

sorry I didn't read ALL the posts (so sorry for redundant information) but we have dealt with some of these woes before. Although PayPal does have some crazy requirements for PCI compliance and so fourth using PayPal would solve two of your problems;<p>1 - requiring tracking numbers for the release of funds 2- Being able to reach someone by phone. We have a direct number for a real human at PayPal, he is always the same human and knows who we are.<p>PayPal will require some reserves for charge-backs (depending on your volume &#38; historical charge back rates)<p>We run millions of dollars with PayPal and aside from reserves it has been a pretty great experience. To answer an earlier question of why not a traditional merchant account, no one has been able to beat the MPF to date.<p>We have also ran pre-orders for items that did not ship for 2-3 months, clearly stated the ship date and had a extraordinary amount of complaints to our support staff, BBB, and even charge backs before the ship date. People do not read. When ordering my DODOcase even being one of the ADHD apple fanboys in question I clearly understood when I could expect the item to arrive (still not at the finish line yet). I feel your pain though, nothing is worse then doing everything right and having a successful product only to have all your funds tied up with the bank, good luck.... Can i have my DODOcase now?

Is google the worst company with support system? this is not the only product that google has no phone or live person that you can speak to.<p>Even their Google apps for businesses only has a support form <a href="http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/support.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/support.html</a> that is really bad.

Yeah, no phone support is a fail. Use amazon or paypal. Mind you, I've heard similar stories from both of those.

With that volume of money, why not use a credit card merchant account? I use one, and I've always found the CC company to be easy to get on the phone and eager to help me with any issues.

Does anyone know "moneybookers" horror stories? I think this service is unencumbered with overprotective US consumer rights.

Google may always be a textbox and button company. If you read their message board for adwords you'll find seriously disgruntled people who've SPENT hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising and still can't get anyone on the phone. That's SPENT...as in less than one year, spend 100K+...no phone support.<p>You can't even BUY support from Google. Basically, go ahead and use their free stuff, but don't do business with Google if you can help it.<p>Obviously, their advertising scales so well, it's hard not to...

So you made $126,000 and your still using Google Checkout. I call bull shit! Most people get a merchant account from their bank and then they don't get screwed.<p>If this is true then I think you should probably send out a nice letter to your customers and tell them that your refunding their money because Google is causing you grief, link to a blog post explaining the situation in details, and ask them to pay again via your new merchant provider. I think that if people saw the refund on their statement, then they'd pay again. Then you'd get something.<p>I think the lesson here is that you should never rely on a service / company who won't put any effort into customer support. I thought this was common sense?

One word, lawsuit.

so, sorry, sir, but we cannot find any proof the packages were delivered using Google Maps Street View. Therefore, they could not have been delivered.<p>we do offer information to help you through your situation. just search on the terms "bankrupt screwed over"

As frustrating as this is for the author, we only have one side of the story, this is not hacker news, it's simple bitching. Perhaps it has a place on reddit, but not here. And the headline is deceptive.