Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

How to handle when customer cancels credit card charge

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • jkwrpc
    replied
    Re: How to handle when customer cancels credit card charge

    Steve

    I am sorry you have had this happen, but I feel this is a really great question and I am glad you took the time to start the thread.

    I did a fair amount of eCommerce type business for government services. In my case we did not want to handle the credit card transactions nor keep the credit card numbers, account numbers, etc., on file. We considered the liability risk outweighed the value of having that information, so we opted for a service through a financial institution. I will suspect IADN does something similar. My point is that if you use a transaction provider can they offer any recommendations for a solution.

    Finally, I think all us who provide software must sadly accept that it will at times be 'stolen' especially online sales. A very bitter pill to swallow. Thankfully the vast majority of customers are not like the one(s) you are discussing.

    If you come up with any recommendations please share them. It could help many of improve our business processes.

    Leave a comment:


  • Steve Wood
    replied
    Re: How to handle when customer cancels credit card charge

    The prospects are better if the item ordered was a physical object that was shipped. In that case, there are 3rd party carriers that delivered the item, got confirmation and you can submit this as proof of delivery. For electronic download items, PayPal is clear, there is not much they can do. They agree to go to bat for me with the credit card company if I show "proof", but that is a couple automatic emails going back and forth. Looking at the order now, clues - buyer name is different than on the order, email address doesn't really match up to either name.

    Besides losing the cash, I don't like that the claim by the buyer is "Unauthorized payment Chargeback" which suggests I am a fraudulent vendor who simply ran their credit card without permission.

    I guess the worst case (other than the lost revenue) is that they buyer's purpose is to take my product download and description and re-sell the items on some other website. I am sure that is a very common practice.

    As mentioned below, after this chargeback I altered my product download process to disable_download so I can stop additional download of the product. I also just altered my Framework license process to prohibit registration if the disable_download is True. But the Framework is a special case, pretty hard to do that on small utilities.

    I think I will try to improve and automate the "proof" side of things. Not just my Transaction Log but some secondary process whereby the buyer 'registers' upon first use after the product is on their desktop.
    Attached Files

    Leave a comment:


  • Tom Cone Jr
    replied
    Re: How to handle when customer cancels credit card charge

    Steve,

    I'm surprised PayPal doesn't have a solution or recommendation for you on this. I suspect its a widespread problem. Can they determine if the customer does this a lot to many vendors? don't they have a vendor ombudsman to help with this ?

    Do you keep track of "disqualified" customers or charge card numbers? getting stung once is bad enough, twice would be a very bitter pill.

    Is there some way to determine if the customer is actually using the software? Could you build something in that notifies you when that occurs? And possibly gives you the particulars, so you could report the theft to law enforcement? Naturally, the documentation should disclose that you will be notified when the purchased software is successfully installed...

    -- tom

    ps. I almost mentioned going to a subscription model, with built in time bomb on subscription lapse, but ...

    Leave a comment:


  • How to handle when customer cancels credit card charge

    I have a nifty shopping cart on my AlphaToGo site. It has all of the normal fraud detection built in to the process. But there is one type of fraud that I do not know how to control. A couple times a year someone orders a bunch of product, the order is authorized, I deliver the goods via download link(s). Nothing else happens for a month, and then suddenly the customer will reverse charges through their credit card provider. PayPal sides with the customer and subtracts the customer's payment from my account. The customer of course does not respond to my emails, never voiced any issue with my product. I have ample "proof" that the customer downloaded the items (I have a "registration server" that shows download date and number of download attempts made.) I also have emails that come to me each time a customer downloads a product. But this is not evidence as far as the credit card company is concerned, and the customer prevails - essentially getting my product for free.

    This is bad enough on AlphaToGo where all the products are mine, but it is worse if it happens on IADN's Shopping Cart. In that case I will have already paid out $ to the vendor and will have to recover those fees (IADN sells product from various A5 Developers).

    I do have the ability to "disable download" on any purchased item, and of course immediately toggled that for all items on this order. So now the customer at least cannot re-download the item.

    For one of the items, the customer cannot make complete use of the product because the same "disable download" will prevent them from registering the product - it requires registration when deployed similar to Alpha's WAS.

    Do any of you have other ideas?
Working...
X