Warning: How Google Checkout Screwed Project Zomboid | Hacker News Reader

Warning: How Google Checkout Screwed Project Zomboid

projectzomboid.com

106 pointse1ven47 comments

For the benefit of the next person: don't ever sell donations. Sell sponsorships/bragging rights/etc. In addition to converting better this reduces payment processor risk. I would strongly suggest doing this in preference to pre-orders, too, since pre-orders are very risky. Structurally guaranteeing that 100% of your customers have not received shipment is a bad place to be in life! You are not Valve.

Bronze Sponsor: You get a 16x16 icon next to your username on our website delivered immediately plus, as a bonus, a free copy of the game when it comes out. $10

Silver Sponsor: As above, icon is silver. $20

Gold Sponsor: As above, icon is gold, you get listed in credits. $40

This is a very solid idea. As an alternative, you can use a payment processor that deals with PayPal and credit card companies on your behalf. With something like FastSpring.com, you get paid as long as the transactions are genuine (e.g., excluding credit card fraud). You never have to deal with PayPal, Google Checkout, or frozen account bullshit.

As has been discussed elsewhere, they broke the terms of service (specifically, you're not allowed to use the terms "donate" or "donation" unless you're a registered non profit) -- they screwed themselves.

While they should be able to get a response from a human, the idea that they're innocent is silly. It seems every small/indie developer thinks they can do whatever and ignore their contractual obligations and get away with it.

Just because you're small doesn't mean things don't apply to you.

While what you say is true, it's still a sub-optimal way to conduct business. There could be many, many ways to do this better. For starters, maybe "Your account has been canceled due to ToS violation: 'donation' may only be used for not for profit organizations."

That's a joke.

A email telling them to remove the word donate within 5 days or their account would be closed, I would totally get that. Shutting down new orders until the verbiage is changed, same thing.

But to say that this is a reasonable action, I just don't see it. There was clearly no deception going on. While it clearly does violate the TOS, the use of donate in this context (a voluntary payment above the minimum that gives no additional benefit) is perfectly reasonable.

I'm not saying that Google isn't within their rights to do this. The author should have been more careful, fine (although I could see myself making the exact same mistake). But this still just hits me wrong. Even if the takeaway is just "if you make a completely innocent mistake that hurts no one, Paypal will alert you while Google will close your account with no recourse," that's STILL plenty of reason to choose Paypal. Who doesn't make innocent mistakes?

You are right. Google is incompetent at customer service. At some point, enough incompetence crosses the line into "evil". Though, in this case, Google is safely in the incompetent category.

It's neither evil nor incompetent. It is simply a business model. Automate what you can and let the rest fail. If any individual case becomes a public embarrassment, resolve that particular case amicably without fixing the root cause.

The unfortunate thing is just that we as users of these services are not given the choice to pay up for reasonable customer support.

Hey, they clicked "Accept" on the TOS. Perhaps they should have read it thoroughly first, and made sure whomever was doing the web design understood the boundaries. A contract is a contract. It's not "let's agree to do this until I violate it and call you a meanie"

There are two way you can deal with things- you can opt to follow the ToS strictly and harshly, or you can opt to behave in a humane way. Robots are expected chose the former option, while human beings are expected to opt for the latter. While the Zomboid guys cant take Google to court for this, they have every right to say that Google screwed them. If you keep being unsympathetic to customers in this fashion, you are eventually going to be termed as evil.

Most of the problems that people experience are self-inflicted. If we use "you should have known better" as the only criterion to determine if sympathy is deserved, we'd be really unsympathetic. The OP should have been more careful and Google should have been more accommodating.

OTOH, how many of these accounts are scams vs. how many are legit companies? If it's 10 to 1, there is an incentive to cut them off as quickly as possible, and not allow any slack.

"support charity" seems to be okay, though. This is what the Humble Bundle[0] calls it.

[0] http://www.humblebundle.com/

I read the post, and decided to do a quick digging on the GC help pages. It seems these guys are incorrect regarding the set_your_own_price idea:

"In the above example, the first five input fields are of type hidden with predefined values while the unit price (item_price_1) field is a text field without a value parameter.

This form will create an input field above the Google Checkout button so the user can specify his own price as shown below:"

taken from: http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?hl=en-...

Humble Indie Bundle do 'set-your-price'+Google Checkout so there has to be a way.

I've found that the problem with using Google's services is that it's very hard to get any sort of direct, 1x1 support from them.

This is very true. It's hard to get anyone via e-mail, on the phone or in their forums when you have questions about their product services or when a problem arises. This is especially concerning when money is involved such as AdSense, AdWords or Google Checkout. They are also big enough that they don't really have to care if they lose you as a customer, especially if you're a small fry just starting out.

Adwords recently added phone support.

Recently? They are a billion dollar product for some time.

It's the only call I've ever made to customer service that actually asked me to leave a message and they'd call me back. Yes, really. Oh, and they didn't.

The problem can be seen across all Google services. They just don't make it easy to contact them when there is a problem. My favorite example is an Orkut application that I developed that I no longer wanted to support. Could I delete the app? No. Could I contact Orkut to take the app down? No. Did I keep receiving e-mails from Orkut that the app was broken? Yes. Eventually their automated system realized something was wrong and took the app down. I would have gladly fixed it had there been a way to do so.

I have noticed Google has one service which has responsive support: Google Project Hosting. <http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting>; It may be just due to low volume of requests.

atleast google is not like other big organisations that not even reply. In this case mistake was of these developers that they themselves violates terms and conditions and want some special treatment. I've personally used Google Adsense and they always get in contact with me if there's some problem.

There are also many AdSense accounts that get shutdown for very vague reasons without warning. The appeals form is basically linked to an automated denial e-mail. Google is definitely not a "people" company & seems to rely & trust their algorithms & computer systems over anything else.

I don't know why this post is surprising. Google doesn't do any individualized customer service, because that doesn't scale. So they apply the same rules to everyone, including this little video game, and probably legions of Internet hucksters. There's no real incentive for Google to alter this arbitrary policy, so they don't. They don't care if you're making an RPG about dragons or selling Viagra.

At its best, this kind of aggregate data-driven decision making can lead to Google search. At its worst, it can lead to those ads you click by mistake on YouTube.

So Pay Pal is out. Google is dubious. Who's left? Amazon? Apple‽

What does it mean that individualized customer service does not scale? It does for paypal, amazon and pretty much any other large co dealing with payments.

Perhaps one day google will wake up and realize that they in fact have products other than search and that they may require a new attitude towards customer service. By all means optimize so the fewest people need to call you up - but don't leave people feeling helpless when your silly online help doesn't cut it.

It doesn't scale.

If you make a software product (without support) which will be used by 1000 people, you need 3 programmers and 1 system engineer. If 100,000 people use your product, you need maybe 1 extra system engineer for a 100 fold increase in usage.

To offer a product including 24/7 customer support to 1000 people, you can get 3 people working from home in shifts. To offer the same support to 100,000 people, you need a department - maybe not 300 people, but you definitely won't get away with hiring two extra people from home.

The word "scale" needs a definition. Everything scales linearly, some things scale logarithmically, etc. In practice, everything scales unless it's serial (nine women can't make a baby in a month, etc).

Customer support doesn't scale amazingly well, but you can get more people to service more customers, so it does scale.

Yours/google's definition of scale is very narrow, which was my point. Google only looks at scale from a software point of view. While that may work with search, there are many industries where you must scale with humans, such as door to door sales. Google's insistence on their narrow vision of scale may have a lot to do with why they find it hard to make in roads with their local strategy or say google checkout. Meanwhile paypal has little problem hiring more people to provide phone support to tens of millions of customers. Google isn't special. In fact, they don't even have tens of millions of customers for most of the products that require such type of support. Sounds too much like premature scaling and overthinking on google's part.

> First off, there was no ‘pay what you want’ option on Google Checkout, so we provided the following options:

I wonder how Google's Font Directory does it. http://www.google.com/webfonts/family?family=EB+Garamond&...

Or the Humble Bundle, for that matter. http://www.humblebundle.com/#contribute

Very easily, it seems:

    item_price_1: 10.00

It's just a submission to the Google Checkout API, so why wouldn't you be able to change it...

I wonder how Google is able to detect the use of the word "donate" and put so much "effort" into monitoring account activities, scanning widgets, blocking accounts and processing emails but not able to allocate a single human from the support department to offer a basic response and further instructions.

Google is good at serving the crowd because that's what bots can do well (tracking, data mining, etc). No one other than developers can really get some direct help from Google, even if you pay them a lot of money.

I believe that consistency and responsibility are important: if you are unhappy with your clients, you have to tell them what to do to switch to somewhere else. This is the real customer care.

Just a guess: they don't think they can reasonably hire people from the Turk to do support.

Google has a legal fiduciary responsibility not to hold onto that money.

You can't just take money on behalf of someone else and then say "Ha ha, you screwed up, read the fine print, now we get to keep the money!".

Google customer service is a mess.

I agree. I'm a huge fan of Google. I honestly don't even expect them to support their 'free' products like Gmail with 1 on 1 customer service. I frankly wouldn't either.

But when Google has your actual cash as in the case of Google checkout, and you can't even get a decent reply from them? That really shakes my faith in them as a company.

Paypal

Why does everyone assume paypal has no support? There's a contact link right on their homepage with email and phone support options. If Google wants to be in this game, I believe they should have to offer the same, especially in cases like for Android developers who have to wait a month to get paid.

Don't know why you got downvoted, when I had problems with my PayPal merchant account, I called a phone number and was able to speak to a real human being.

Google customer service is an oxymoron.

Can someone link to / quote the section in the Checkout TOS that restricts use of "donate" or "donation"? I'm only finding this: https://checkout.google.com/termsOfService?type=Seller which only mentions "if Seller identifies ... as "non-profit" and is verified ... then Seller may use the Service to process donations from Buyers." Which is not "may not use 'donate' or 'donation' unless == nonprofit", which seems to be claimed by a great many comments on the interwebs.

Though I'm not attempting to sign up. That's the TOS from the bottom of https://checkout.google.com/sell

I've never used google checkout from the merchant side, so I just poked around for a bit. I'll avoid doing the whole lmgtfy thing, but this appears to be what you're looking for:

http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer...

There's also this page, which I found by just clicking "content policies" under the merchant section (look at "fundraising"):

https://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answe...

Content policies seems to be the most-likely damning.

Mentions of donations elsewhere are heavily paired with "donate" buttons, and I don't know if they had used such a button. Cost + voluntary bonus does, to me, imply valid use of the word "donate", and I'm hoping for something concrete, given the number of authoritative-sounding "can't say 'donate' w/o 501.c3" comments.

The most surprising part of this article to me is how popular Google Checkout is becoming. A few years ago you'd be lucky to see a handful of sites offer it alongside Paypal, and never in lieu of it. The explosion of Android might have something to do with it, as the Market requires Checkout (outside of the recently-added carrier billing.)

I probably don't have the skills to write a video game from scratch... but I can knock out a payment processor integration in a day... so, why the hell do these companies keep relying on Google and PayPal to shitcan their businesses? Man up, get a real payment processor, where you can get real people on the phone. I'd suggest Chase Bank. If it's about conversions, if you're selling something people will only buy through PayPal, you're doing it wrong.

So what happens to the money? It gets sent back to the people that "donated" right.

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