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BuyVM Problem
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So let me see if I understand this... your telling me you rather back stab your own customer for 20$ and have him leave your service completely rather than actually work with him to fix the problem, have him continue to be your customer and take the additional profit from the newly purchased account? This could have been a tale of BuyVM going out of their way to help their customer, where they would have looked like the heroes for being patient and working with the customer to make sure he got his new account and policy was followed by notifying the customer of the outstanding debt. However instead it is a story of trying to milk every penny out of your customer and take advantage of him when his goal was to do MORE business with you and give you MORE money, just to get your last due 20$.
I know you guys are in business to make money and just like a beautiful stripper you do not want to be taken advantage of and abused, but if someone is trying to do MORE business with you, isn't it worth the extra .5 hours of labor to take your time and make sure the customer understands why things are being done a certain way? You know, give the customer the time of day and try to work the issue out with them instead of just being short?
Sure it is in your TOS and no one will fault you in the end for carrying out the rules, but in this case I saw someone actually trying to spend more money with you, who liked your product and was even ready to put down a years payment with you and instead of working with him to get that product, you took monies from him and then basicly told him to "Go F*ck Yourself" because he got confused over your TOS. Point being, the OP canceled all his services with you now.
So, I want to know, in the end was the 20$ worth losing a customer over and tarnishing your reputation for?
I am not trying to start more crap, but looking at this from a logical point of view it was giving me a migraine, because it just doesn't look right, regardless of the rules. Did it not used to be "The customers always right"? Have you become so big that the customer doesn't matter anymore?
my 2 cent.
Cheers!
I found it very convenient having multiple accounts with the same hosting provider. Never had any problem with it.
Shouldn't it be possible? I don't get it. Even Paypal allows 1 personal and 1 business account. What about if you run multiple companies/brands?
He wasn't backstabbed though. He did it multiple times and was warned each time that it'd turn bad if he continued doing it. Read back fully, namely to the logs with Aldryic.
The client is hardly being backstabbed even if we simply billed him for it anyways. Why isn't he reading the TOS? It isn't a very long TOS! Shit son, the multiple account thing is right in the TL;DR at the very top of the page.
If the guy can't take the time to read literally 10 very short sentences, then I don't know what to say.
Francisco
We've had people in the past that we allowed to have multiple accounts but they abused it as well to try to shuffle services between them and evade invoices they owed.
Ask anyone that has been banned off paypal before. It sticks once they find out you have another account.
Francisco
Or, depending on how the story spreads, might be a sign for abusers to say "Hey, I can abuse the system and BuyVM is fool enough they will ignore my previous misbehavior to retain my stay. Otherwise I can complain why I was treated differently with that one customer."
Bingo.
We can't play favourites. Once we do that we may as well just throw the TOS out and just rip off Bursts or something like so many do.
Sure I would have preferred to hold the sale and we would have if the client actually read the TOS. It's on the client for not doing that and will hopefully do so in the future with whoever he works with.
Francisco
@Francisco not commenting on your business practices. but if when he signed up for the second account, after not remembering the first account. He would not have had the cartoon on top until the accounts got merged. So really it would have been a surprise about the new invoice. It looks like it's all over and done with but that is just something I noticed in your regards to the cartoon at the top. He wouldn't have known about the invoice until the accounts were merged and emails changed.
Please read the sequence of events instead of making up some 'could be' scenario.
http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/192182#Comment_192182
@Francisco is in the right here. He violated ToS.
Obviously OP is to blame for not reading the ToS, but I don't think that warranted the way he was treated at all. This thread seriously makes me question whether BuyVM is a company I want to do business with if they have an "accuse of fraud first, ask questions later [or rather, don't bother asking questions at all]" mentality.
Looking at the log Aldryic posted, he tried to order from the first account. Being blocked by the outstanding invoice, he then create a second account. So I assume he has seen the cartoon at least once. Yes this issue arise several months later, quite possible that he forgot about the cartoon already.
I think @Ree is just stating a personal feeling after reading the thread, no place did @Francisco state as much, but individual people will draw what they want from things. There are valid arguments on both sides of this coin, end of the day, the buck stops on @Francisco's desk, and their policy is their policy.
Do I (or anyone) have the time to read the legalese on every little thing in life? No. Nor do you. That's infuriating that you've somehow schooled me like I'm 8 years old.
you don't publish any other contact info. How else should I have contacted you?
Yes, my english is fine. I'm concerned about the english of your reps. They seem to think that by saying, "You committed fraud" encapsulates a full explanation of the situation. Until the last part of this thread I had no idea why you were treating me like this. I had no idea why you removed $20 from me. No explanation whatsoever. Please understand that I have no logfile to refer to. I don't keep perfect notes of every tiny $5 service I sign up for and discard. Saying, "You owed $5 from your old account and there's a $15 account joining fee as stated in our ToS." would have avoided this entire thread. The very idea that you can read this thread and then read the ticket I made and still think that I'm somehow trying to defraud you speaks volumes about you and how you view your customers.
You have my permission to post the ticket text as long as you remove contact info. There is no new information in there that I haven't fully described in this thread.
Ignorantia juris non excusat.
You've probably read a lot of crap that's posted on this site. So I think you DO have time to read TOS. It's a lot shorter than LOTR, I tell you. And easier to read. But if you really think you don't have time for it: make time for it. You probably also read the contract between you and your employer, why not read TOS?
LMGTFY: buyvm.net/contactus.php
That's stupid of you then. I keep every single of those e-mails. I've got this great thing called Google Mail that gives you gigabytes of storage (either free or paid). There's plenty of other services that do that as well. It enables you to keep all e-mail you ever get. You should try it.
***************************************DISCLAIMER***************************************
I'm sorry, I've just had it with lame excuses and idiots not reading TOS, it's nothing personal
***************************************DISCLAIMER***************************************
You agreed to those fee's when signing up for service with buyvm.
So what are you complaining about?
It was a play on the saying "shoot first, ask questions later". Probably not very fitting, since it seems like questions weren't asked at all (which is why I added "[or rather, don't bother asking questions at all]") until OP posted here.
Credit card industry rules say about the same thing and if you try to do this you're almost guaranteed to lose a chargeback if the customer files one
If the customer paid $132 for an invoice that said Service B (and the $132 invoice didn't list the overdue balance on Service A") , and you canceled Service B without providing the service, you need to refund the total amount paid on the Service B invoice to protect yourself in the event of a chargeback (the average card issuer CS grunt processing the chargeback is unlikely to give a flying F what your TOS says and will decide in the customer's favor).
The safest thing for the host to do would have been 1) issue a full refund for the $132 payment 2) send the customer a separate payment reminder invoice for the $20 overdue balance 3) wait a while, and if there is no response to the payment reminder invoice turn the overdue balance over to collections
SIDENOTE:
I realize the customer paid by PayPal, but if they used a credit card to fund that PayPal payment and they file a chargeback directly with their credit card company it increases your chance of losing because PayPal is notorious for not fighting a large percentage of chargebacks)
If the VPS was rented for personal use I'll give you a (half) pass because 99% of consumers are lazy and don't bother to read it, but you're only setting yourself up for situations like this if you neglect to read the TOS. Taking one minute out of your day to read the TOS before clicking 'agree' is to your benefit and can save you a lot of grief and money if something goes wrong.
If you run a business and you rented this VPS for business purposes you don't get a pass (and I'd recommend standing in the corner with a dunce cap). If you're running a business you need to "read the legalese on every little thing in life" and if you don't the odds favor your business winding up on the list of small businesses that fail within the first few years.
So, and let me try to understand you here, you're saying that you read the entire TOS on every service and product you use? If that's so, do you believe that most people do this? We're talking about a $5 service at this point.
wow
We have a TL;DR boss, go look at the page. It's literally 10 lines to get a pretty solid run down of our whole TOS. Come on now boss. I'm not trying to break your balls here no matter what you might be thinking, but the TL;DR is at the very top of the page which means you didn't even bother clicking on it to begin with.
Please, at least check the TOS page right now and see what i'm talking about so you can see i'm not joking around: https://my.frantech.ca/tos.php
At the end of the day you tried to order on an account that had a big 'invoice unpaid' warning. Instead of resolving this by logging a ticket (Aldryic would have helped you on the spot), you registered a new account all together. Honestly, the time you spent registering a new account, you could have likely got your original account all cleared up.
While I'll have a sit down with the guys to explain things better, understand that 99% of the cases where this very issue comes up? It's always fraud. It's always someone trying to come back that has tried to fraud payments before or a spammer or just all sorts of crappy clients that we don't want on our equipment.
I apologize if you take offense or think we're asking too much but really now, our TOS isn't the big 9 page ordeals that some hosts have.
Francisco
FYI to the OP.
Aldryic did open a ticket with you explaining this all. The ticket was sent to your @d*******e.com email. Here's the ticket:
We did our part.
Francisco
And again, for what must be the 4th time on this thread, I freely admit that I didn't read your ToS. And for this mistake I now somehow owe you $20.
Is $20 what this thread is about? Let me make it totally clear at this time: This thread(and my ticket) was made to try to figure out WHY your rep took a set of actions that seemed to be completely bizarre. It took the entire ticket and one full page of this thread to get an answer that would have taken 20 seconds to type out.
So, with a special mix of paranoia and laziness, you've lost what would have been a long-term customer. You're running a business and not a court of law. If you don't know the difference then that will cost you.
And again, I HAVE NO ACCESS TO THIS ACCOUNT. I cannot have ever read this.
Indeed
No, he logged a ticket with you right away. You never actually replied to the ticket and to this very minute it still sits at pending customer reply.
Alas, that's what happens. It doesn't happen often but if a client can't read our very simple TOS, it means they also didn't read our AUP and would probably end up hosting crap they shouldn't.
It sucks and every time the issue comes up (granted, it's almost a once a year thing) I wish it wasn't a policy we had to keep. But, we get a lot of foot traffic towards our website.
More and more companies are applying very similar policies. While some hosts that are in this thread are talking ill of the whole old invoice thing, many of them were posting in the WHMCS hook thread a while back that people were working to do the very same thing - stop people from ordering if they have outstanding invoices.
I apologize if you took offence or if the guys were a little rough but they did reach out to you.
Francisco
And that's our issue.....how? I think the only thing the guys could have done differently would have been to email your @gmail instead of the @d**** one.
Francisco
>
@travisapple
Anyhow it seems like a massive waste of time for all parties involved.
@travisapple
"And again, I HAVE NO ACCESS TO THIS ACCOUNT. I cannot have ever read this." <<<"The ticket was sent to your @d*******e.com email."
You are a true genious really.
@mpkossen: +1
Yes, that's probably right. If a person didn't read your ToS, he's likely a criminal.
agreed