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Just a side note: I looked again through this thread and now think that my calling that provider (you) an a__hole was premature and too hard a judgement. So I apologize to you. Sorry, man.
But still, keeping an ex-customers money (no matter how nicely dressed up) is not OK.
I assume you mention this because I briefly noted that you dont have an imprint?
Ok, as an explanation: why did I bring this up?
Because after your last response to my ticket I wanted to simply call you to sort this out in person, especially since you made out this invoice (which you created after I overpaid) out as "UNPAID".
So I just wanted to call you, but I could not find any contact information neither on your webiste nor on the invoice.
Your invoices only show the company name and a VAT ID.
No name of a person or address, no phone, or ANY contact option whatsoever.
Also: no "legal representation" = name of either owner or chairman or whatever applies to your type of company.
According to german law (I can not comment for swedish law!!) invoices MUST contain full address and name of owner / representative.
Then I looked at your websites (mrvm.net / mikhosoft.com / freecpanelhosting) and found only one email address, nothing else in this respect.
Under german law ANY business selling to customers in germany MUST have an Imprint, listing the legally resonsible person/entity for the site.
Note that this speciffically also applies for businesses operating from outside germany, if they sell to customers in germany. (example case here)
Fine for this is up to 50.000 EUR.
I leave it to parties that are more informed than me about comparable regulation in sweden.
Again:
For me this was an inconvenience that lead to me posting here as well as one factor in deciding against you for the future.
But back to topic.
Sorry, respectfully, you are giving a wrong impression here.
The email you reffer to did deal speciffically only with the problems that occured because you changed your company name:
"MrVM.net was previously known as FreeCpanelSharedHosting and earlier this year changed name and domain to mrVM.net.
Unfortunately, this created an issue for customers who had created a Paypal subscription for services bought under the FCSH brand.
I ask you to check if you have an active Paypal subscription and if the name FreeCpanelSharedHosting is mentioned on that subscription.
If you have, please cancel that subscription and create a new one when the invoice is due."
Yes, I did get that email, in august.
This is not an argument pro or con anything, this is just totally unrelated.
Am I responsible fopr my subscriptions? Yes, of course I am.
Is it my mistake? Yes, of course! I never doubted that!
But errors happen. To anyone. This time it was me. Big deal.
It is only reasonable to search for a solution that helps the needs of both parties if someone does an error.
This is true in all cases, but particularily if they have a contract!
A contract brings - independent of individual TOS clauses - a commitment to work to each other's general benefit. Because a contract generally assumes that there is a good faith and both parties work together to the common success.
So why are you so resistant? What's the big deal here?
Why is this such a big thing?
What in gods name makes this so important to you that you take it upon yourselv to wrike tickets and postings instead of just clicking that button.
I already offered to cover your expenses!
I think I really fail to see the problem here. You act as if I would ask you to do something tremendously complicated and expensive. It's one click!
As it has been said before, I consider this as an unfair disadvantage for the customer.
By the way, (and that also goes to all the comments here about "cancelling a contract and get it refunded within 14 days"):
The contrace ended.
I cancelled, he aggreed and so for all intents and purposes the contract is terminated and past. THEN he received another payment.
Personall, I believe that a TOS clause that states that overpayments are automatically credited without any chance to get them back are a misuse of a TOS and probably do not stand up in court.
But this matter here is even worse, as we don't actually have no contract any more.
Either (WITH contract) it should be your contractual obligation to find a solution that suits us both.
Or (WITHOUT contract) you can just cling on to my money even less, because it has not been made under a contract any more.
Either way: give back.
...and by "you are not my customer any more" I assume what you mean is "I still keep your money, but resent to provide any value for it."?
Sorry, that's just ridiculous.
That's like a wet dream of a lawyer.
You can't just single-handedly define that you take away everything a customer has payed you for no return whatsoever.
You can not do this within an existing contract, and you can do this even less if there is no contract.
If you terminate a contract with a customer for whatever reason, you will at least need to give back any pre-paid money.
Which, if you would aggree to do, would allow us to not even let it come to a dispute.
BTW: The appropriate word for this in my opinion is "blackmailing".
Without being a lawyer, I can not imagine neither of both clauses to be legally tangile.
You can write into your TOS what you want, but don't count on it that it survives first contact with a judge.
So you keep 100% and I get no value in return for my money ever again?
Wrong: the money is "not mine", because it is not "money" any more, it is now a credit in a system that I do not intend to use any more.
It is worth ZERO to me right now.
Sorry, but the task to advertise and sell your services is and remains yours, not mine.
Good luck with that (in all honesty), but I will not engage in that endeavour.
Well, we aggree on that one then, do we.
So could we please settle score and you give back what you owe me?
Ok, to come to a conclusion here:
This already took more than enough time from sufficient number of people.
I'd like to politely ask you one more time to refund either fully or partially, keeping a reasonable share to cover any fee that you might have to cover @paypal.
I have already lost 31 USD, they have a value of zero to me where they are right now, so I can only gain by opening a dispute. Subsequently I will do so if we do not come to a close here.
Holy Monday. Kitty murderer. That's some tall wall of text.
Holy cow, how could I forget to throw in some entertaining
#DICKS#poop references to please the crowd!?!My bad, sorry.
Here extra for you @deank Daenerys on the toiLET
Accept nothing less then your full money as a refund as it refunds the PayPal fees as well. PayPal will most likely find in your favor. And if they don't as long as the funds came off a card with a Visa or MasterCard logo you are protected and can do a claim directly with your card issuer. I'll never understand why anyhost would ever keep money for a service not provided.
PayPal are some of the biggest crooks if you ask me. I stopped using them In 2003.
from what I know in Germany they will be very likely side with the customer, due to a lot of customer protection laws here. I'd suspect them to even refund (partially) on good will from their own pocket if they find laws of different countries possibly contradicting.
good to see that mrvm changed some things - one might consider that to be related to this incident here... like adding more details to the imprint and changing the ToS a bit.
though I don't think a $25 administration fee for handling a refund request will stand in court, it's definitely the right direction ;-)
Yet they allow companies to allow you to sign up online then insist you FAX or physically post your cancellation.... balanced haha.
Netcup have a €25 to unsuspend a server in their terms and I guess they have a good legal team, so it probably would stand and handling the refund could be argued to be more admin work than unsuspending a server.
to be honest I still doubt that those would stand in court either. it's just that no one has taken it that far yet.
I assume both things would most likely also be subject to proof/evidence on why that amount is asked for. so if you can prove that these costs really occur for unsuspending a customers vserver and there is no cheaper way to do it...
maybe things could be compared to existing jurisdiction (here) for other cases like fees on issuing demand letters or fees after revoked direct debit. those are quite restricted to come close to the real fees from postage or banking incurred and putting much 'extra' on top of that has regularly been ruled out.
to be clear I don't want to blame anyone or complain about. and of course not saying that other (including german) companies don't play the same game ;-)
as said I am welcoming all changes which this customer feedback and discussion might have helped with.
@AnthonySmith, everyone got their underpants on?
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2912474/#Comment_2912474
Exactly as I said in that message. Just tweak your TOS and you can keep all the money you want and even charge more if you have CC details on file
But what if the money are actually sent by a loan shark and now the host owes them money plus weekly interest?
Why do you think you only get IPv4? Easier to break your
kneesroutes! Fergeddabouddit!I always read the title as a directory (slash) ...
If I managed to properly confuse you, that's not such a bad result :-)
Maybe but I can tell you that a way bigger company, that lobbies with the political party has the bad habit of trying to milk the client ta that cancel their services.
They tried to milk me for about €300, someone on legal department called me once their client reps gave up on trying to convince me to pay. This person threatened me with further fees and I told her that I'd be happy to go to court with them.
Never heard of them ever since.
My point being, large companies with large, experienced and legal teams, also write abusive contracts because they know the majority of clients will be afraid of them. And that's because they make the same assumption you are making here.
My point being, large companies with large, experienced and legal teams, also write abusive contracts because they know the majority of clients will be afraid of them. And that's because they make the same assumption you are making here.
Yet they are just doing what they said they would do and whoever signed up chose to accept that, I appreciate not everyone agrees with me, I just believe that if you accept conditions and you are not forced you should just suck it up and stop whinging after the fact.
Putting words into a TOS doesn't make a provider right, let alone lawful. Not sure whats hard for you to understand here.
Stop trying to shame clients that disagree with you, claiming they are whinning, it's childish to say the least.
I know youre better than than that
Hold your horses, I am better than that, simply because that is not at all what I am doing, I even said I know it is not popular, I even said I am changing my own terms because it is apparent I am in a minority of thinking.
That does not change the fact that I simply believe that if no one forces you to buy a product in an open market and you have choice you should use it, if you don't agree, don't buy then whinge afterwards when all the company you have bought from is doing is exactly what they said they would do.
I appreciate people do not read terms, I go to ridiculous degrees to emphasis and remind users at every turn and on top of that I do not force subscriptions, so you choose to buy on those terms, you then choose to use a subscription, you then decide to make it my headache.
That is my personal perspective, it wont change but the company one will as I have already said, I am going to update the terms for 2019 so that users have 28 days from the natural renewal date to claim back any over payments without penalty providing the product itself was cancelled.
Read thorough Apple's contracts or warranty doc.
You will find it ridiculous.
You did it just above, you asked people to stop whining after the fact. And yes I saw your post earlier which is also why (but not only because of that) that I know you're better than that.
Reality dictates that people don't usually read TOS's, companies know it and abuse it (I'm not accusing you of doing it).
Also, I find it sad that people need to read the TOS to find out if a specific company respect clients basic rights.
People are supposed to not have to do that, TOS's are not meant to be used as a tool to abuse the relationship between a provider and a client, so clients shouldn't have to read a TOS to find that out.
Do note that I'm specifically referring to abusive clauses, every other clause that is brought up and not read by the client, I'd say... "ooops you need to suck it up". I've been in that place myself and suck it up, moreover I didn't hold it against the provider. But if it's an abusive clause then you won't hold me to it and I'll welcome our day in court and, or your debt collectors. But to be honest, It's yet to happen as companies know what they are doing, they usually just push it as far as possible to see if the other side breaks.
We're just talking, I mean no disrespect.
I'm the antithesis of an apple fan boy.
I think it was Italy that warned Apple that they wuld be blocked from selling in Italy if they didn't get their terms up to speed. It seems they were not respecting the 2 years warranty obligation.
But then, Italy also fined apple for the battery slowdown controversy....
maybe I am just not communicating well, I am guilty of it a fair bit, I don't mean to piss anyone off, I just call a spade a spade and perhaps it does not help me get my perspective over as civilly as I could in the moment.
I remember now. We were trying to do variable payment amounts. With paypal billing agreements you can't deviate from the initial agreement the customer has with you without the agreement being cancelled and a new one being initiated. So it was not worth our time to pursue billing agreements with what we wanted to do.
I'm not aware of such a limitation. We use billing agreements and customers can change plan, order extra services etc without recreating their billing agreement.
The main problem is that you are in fact trying to communicate.
Don't.
Not possible in the REST API https://github.com/paypal/PayPal-REST-API-issues/issues/25
https://github.com/paypal/PayPal-NET-SDK/issues/221
Also you are using blesta. There are only two paypal gateways available unless you developed your own. One is paypal payflow pro, and one is paypal payments standard. Paypal payments standard does not use billing agreements.
First off, thanks for engaging here and even have the courage to modify your TOS against your personal opinion.
Just to help you understand this from customer-side, let’s just take me as the classic example:
Did I read the TOS when I signed up? Frell, no!
Why?
Firstly, for that few bucks, my time is just more important to me spent elsewhere.
And secondly, I simply want to trust people that we threat each other decently.
If I can’t trust a provider that far than he is the wrong choice anyway.
Which in the case that this thread is about obviously is the case, because keeping something for doing nothing is just wrong in my opinion, independent of the TOS-discussion.
Also, even IF I had read his TOS, I probably wouldn‘t have remembered that detail or just the fact that this contract runs over a pp subscription a year later when I cancelled.
Am I an exceptional combination of naivity, stupidity and bad memory?
Could be.
Or maybe I’m just plain normal and this is just what you need to be prepared for and have a plan for when you open up a business.
Most successful enterprises are not successful because they only deal with the cool nerdy stuff and try to push most of the boring real-world customer problems into the customers responsibility.
But rather the other way around.
thinking back, i remember reading multiple threads where most people agree that TOS dont mean shit. no idea what the threads were about tho, so maybe im misremembering some facts about them. personally i would say this is one of those cases (if service/contract has been ended, you should be able get that money back)
other than that, arent there laws preventing you from keeping accidentally sent money? then again this is kinda different case and IANAL.
i would understand if we were talking some 5$/y kinda deal, but 30$/y is decent amount, and honestly that kind of "25$ administrative fee" for dealing with this kind of issue is bs too (if i understood correctly that thats what they added)
In my experience, most hosts are more than willing to work with you- but if you're a dickhead who opens 40 tickets because you forgot to cancel, the dickhead fee applies.
Also, considering that many of these are bargain-basement services (this is LET), the cost of processing your charge, and then reversing it, combined with the time to pay whoever handles your issue- often outweighs the $10/yr or whatever they stood to make from it.
The whmcs gateway I linked allows you to charge any amount. There are no amount limitations. It is not a subscription. It basically just says "hey paypal, charge them this amount using this previous agreement we have" each time whmcs does a transaction. https://myworks.design/software/whmcs-paypal-billing-agreements-payment-gateway
It charges it exactly like you would a credit card.