Re: Over $10,000 in *LOST* book sales

On May 12, 11:29 am, Gerry <somewh...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-05-12 06:31:23 -0700, sheetsofsound <jackzuc...@xxxxxxxxx> said:



I reposted this because I put the wrong title the previous posting. It
should have said $10,000 in *LOST* book sales. Oy...

I just discovered last saturday out that customers who bought my books
using 2checkout.com and who paid by credit card between May 2006 and
May 2009 were never charged. Their credit cards were authorized but
the charge was never put through. I am in the process of sending out
letters to folks who were effected in the hopes of recovering some of
the funds. I have spoken with an attorney who feels that the credit
card company and I equally share culpability in the issue for a number
of reasons which I will explain in further detail later but the bottom
line is that suing them would be a crap shoot and he advised me to
file an amendment to my tax returns and to contact buyers and hope
that folks will pay for books who got them for free.

A little more detail...
I accept payments through paypal and 2checkout.com...Or...at least I
did until this issue. I've since deleted 2checkout.com as a payment
source on my site. But folks who paid me through paypal or bought from
amazon I continued to receive payments on. Apparently 2checkout also
allows folks to use paypal, check or e-check from within their system.
Folks who paid with a check or paypal through 2checkout.com paid for
their books I received payment on it. But folks who paid with a credit
card through 2checkout just got authorized but not charged.

What happened was that 2checkout.com changed their policy in may of
2006 and required vendors to mark orders as shipped. What I was not
told was that orders not marked as shipped were never charged to the
customer. They were authorized only. I never received notification of
this policy change but it was listed on their site which I rarely
logged into since I process my orders from the email notifications.

They did contact me at one point and mentioned they noticed a few
orders that were not marked as shipped but I emailed back that I had
never done that and that I was still receiving payments. They replied
back that it looked like I had been marking orders as shipped and I
assumed their software must have been doing that. They never told me
people weren't being charged. They certainly didn't perform due
diligence in following up. That's for sure. They're losing money too
on this so you'd think at some point they would have had someone
contact me to figure out what was up.

And no, it's not resolved. At this point I'm told that the resolution
will in my court, so to speak. IOW, I'll be contacting folks who
didn't pay and hope I can recover some funds.

I'm considering setting up a private page within my site that will
allow folks to make a re-payment. Not sure of the details yet. More
later...

Absolutely amazing.  Something as critical as that and the company
should have notified you personally, via phone or snail mail and likely
had you sign something indicating you understood.  That is amazingly
short-sighted of them.

I will be very interested to know what percentage of those who got a
freebie will fork it over.  Guts tells me 90%+.  Maybe I'm too
optimistic. But riddle me this: If the company has their CCard
information and authorization to charge them, why can't they charge
them NOW?  

Good question. I assume there's a statute of limitations with cc
charges and I'll bet it's very short. I'm currently looking into this.
When I first noticed the issue on saturday, 2checkout advised me to
individually go into each sale and reauthorize the charge. They said
that should take care of it. I asked them if they could run a query to
automate it since it was taking a 30-60 seconds for each one. They
told me they could not so I spent over 3 hours reauthorizing every
sale that fell into the unbilled category. All 306 sales in that
category failed to reauthorize. They had no explanation other than
possibly a bug in their software. They are currently looking into

Their terms of use are pretty iron clad:

LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY

2CO DOES NOT ACCEPT LIABILITY BEYOND THE REMEDIES SET FORTH HEREIN,
INCLUDING ANY LIABILITY FOR PRODUCTS NOT BEING AVAILABLE FOR USE OR
FOR LOST OR CORRUPTED DATA OR SOFTWARE, OR THE PROVISION OF SERVICES
AND SUPPORT. 2CO WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR LOST PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS
OR OTHER CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR STATUTORY
DAMAGES, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. YOU AGREE
THAT FOR ANY LIABILITY RELATED TO THE PURCHASE OF PRODUCTS OR SERVICES
BUNDLED WITH THE PRODUCTS, WHETHER FOR BREACH OF CONTRACT, WARRANTY,
NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY IN TORT OR OTHERWISE, 2CO SHALL NOT BE
LIABLE OR RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY AMOUNT OF DAMAGES ABOVE THE AGGREGATE
DOLLAR AMOUNT PAID BY YOU FOR THE PURCHASE OF PRODUCTS OR SERVICES
UNDER THESE PURCHASE TERMS GIVING RISE TO SUCH LIABILITY.

I think with a little legal push (read: a rant from your lawyer over
the phone) they would simply "conclude" each transaction that has been
in an inordinately long "in progress" stage.  They (you?) could
additionally email a note to each saying they were late-billing due to
technical problems and to please forgive the inconvenience.

I'm planning on setting up a re-payment webpage and I'll email folks
who received books but were never charged and see what happens. I'll
probably email and/or send a letter and possibly a phone number.
.

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