Well… judging from posts & deleted comments, it looks like the ongoing ‘usability study’ will undoubtedly come up with something like ‘2Checkout should continue their trial and error approach with the purchase pages and pay us to do a study after every new change’and ‘keep changing the website to keep everyone on their toes.’
Guys… I just get used to one thing and suddenly it changes. I had to hunt around for ages on this gaudy new site design just to work out how to make a post (hmmm… maybe there’s something in that 
)
And just so that nobody thinks I’m a 2CO-basher, I’ll say something very nice at the end.
But for now:
1) The main site design… argh! it looks homemade, man! It was SO much more professional-looking two incarnations ago. Even the PayPal website looks more serious now. Is this a mad attempt at jumping on the Web 1.5 bandwagon? 
2) PayPal still sucks and it would be great NOT to read the comments like, ‘we’ve introduced a change across the board, and we’re going to spend not-inconsiderable amounts of money testing whether it loses sales or not.’
If this is really a ‘community’, I’d rather see the money spent on fixing the unfinished stuff in the admin area, like the bits where it says you can assign users with limited privileges, but they actually get top-level admin privileges when they log in. You know, little things like that.
3) The payment page & process still looks like a textbook ‘don’t make pages like this, and don’t make your users click so many buttons’ scenario.
4) We still can’t opt out of PayPal, even if it could mean serious problems for certain types of transactions
5) Anyone who asks about the PayPal disaster seems to get fobbed off with a cut-and-paste response along the lines of, “It’s not a disaster, we’re making lots of money from it.”
On a much, much more pleasant note, I’ve just been on the phone to support to ask about a slightly odd credit card transaction that was made by a client whom I know personally.
I spoke to two absolutely lovely ladies who dealt with my questions quickly and decisively, even though the query was about a fairly freak situation (an order from an IP adress that was showing up as being both Russian and Turkish at once, among other things).
It was one of those rare moments when, as the support person asks, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”, that I really wanted to think of something else just to keep her on the line
I just wish I got the same feeling from everything else at 2CO.
4 Comments »
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Bobs12,
I don’t know what deleted comments you could be talking about. Heavy handed moderation tends to hinder communication, so we rarely delete anything other than duplicates and profanity. The system does automatically moderate comments suspected of being spam, but these still get manually reviewed and posted.
1. We’re currently working on an updated, simplified and more informative landing page.
2. 2CO is an e-commerce solution, a reseller and an alternative to payment processors and merchant accounts. We must make this relationship clear, so we can maintain our relationship with the credit card associations and continue to offer our services. This, unfortunately, occassionally limits the customization options we can provide.
This community site is developed and maintained by a different team than the one that develops and maintains the transaction pages and the administration areas, so rest assured we’re not taking resources away from core services. The new vendor admin will address your specific complaint, when it is complete.
3. Based on research and user feedback, we are working on making the transaction pages more efficient. If you remember our latest rollout notes from January 24th, you’ll see we’ve already released one option to shorten the transaction process. I imagine you’ll be especially interested to know that we’re also currently beta testing a one-page transaction process. We’ll make an official announcement if we open the beta and/or when it’s officially released.
4 & 5. It’s not currently possible to opt out of PayPal. This may change in the future, but we cannot currently offer this ability. There are, however, many upcoming improvements to the transaction pages and the backend that will address some of your complaints about this payment option.
A few thoughts for you:
2CO is committed to improvement. We’re a growing company. Change is inevitable. You may not like every change, but you can be sure that we are keeping a close eye on the numbers to insure that sales increase and everyone benefits.
Take another look at the latest release notes. Every single thing there is in response to supplier demand. You might want to take a look at some older release notes to see more changes made in response to supplier demand.
Thank you for the kind words about our phone agents. I’ve passed your compliments to their managers.
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I’m fairly sure some comments to a post I made (in the last incarnation
) were ‘lost’ – I may be mistaken though. I often am 
1. Wahey! Any chance of letting vendors wholesale have a look at it & comment on it (privately, even) before it goes live? Will there be a demo? I’d like to see if I can sell another book before Christmas, this might just help
2. I bet our customers don’t understand the difference
2.1 Good, I look forward to bashing the new admin section too
3. Sorry, I don’t sell so much as to check rollout notes every day
I make beer money and I drop by when I’m bored or on occasions when I see that a lot of carts have been abandoned one after the other 
Sometimes I just drop by to annoy Cliff when I’ve spent some of the beer money.
Efficiency is gooood.
One-page would be excellent. Really excellent in fact. I’d be willing to put money (literally) on it boosting the number of completed purchases. Right now I’m loath to try any paid advertising because of the PayPal doodah. Impulse buying online for low-cost items requires the least number of steps for people to part with money, otherwise they start to evaluate the effort required to get the product and compare it with its price.
4 & 5. I wouldn’t necessarily want to totally opt out of PayPal. In the distant past I’ve missed opportunities on account of not dealing with PayPal. I’m sure it could happen again. I don’t have an account with them because I don’t want to be associated with them. If you have time to email me about the possible improvements (I’m guessing from your wording that you don’t want to shout about them?) – a few quick lines would be great. I may be able to get a nice little contract to create a document management system for the Russian chaps I mentioned in another post, and 2CO would be my natural choice to work with if the PP problem could be addressed.
However, on occasions I understand that it can be useful to be able to accept other people’s favoured online currency. But there are times when I don’t think it would be the best idea.
I would really like to see an option to switch it off for ‘products not suited to PayPal payments.’ i.e. to be able to toggle it on a per-product basis.
Of the few people that bought from me (and you’ll be able to see how few, I’m sure
) only one person (AFAIK) paid with PayPal, downloaded his item and I got a chargeback & lost 10 pints of beer because the PP account wasn’t verified…
For me, that’s a 100% failure rate with PayPal, and I can’t say that the email support reply was particularly comforting. I should have called
If I sold a million times a day and that happened a hundred times, I’d probably just laugh. But under the circumstances I felt most indignant >:(
One thing though – if I want to use PayPal, ever, it would be to take very small payments. As I understand, I can’t do this via PP and 2CO, as I’d have to pay extra charges from 2CO for the privilege of having the PP validated by them, only to be cancelled by PP itself
Quite often increased sales are quoted as the great thing (and as you noted here, the overall desired result of all developments) that came from the PayPal option – could it be that the overall increase in sales was mundanely predictable, in the way that offering a payment option used by millions and millions could be expected to have such an effect… but that it might have offset a dropoff of sales from people who would otherwise have paid by credit card but got lost in the ‘your eyelids are growing heavieeer… click on the PaaayPaaaaaal optiooooon’ labyrinth?
I don’t know, I don’t get enough traffic through my site to draw conclusions, but what I saw was a small number of people trying several times to go through the payment process (two or three abandoned carts from the same IP address, which I take to mean that they were determined to buy but had to take several run-ups). This hadn’t happened before, and when I went to have a look at the payment process myself… I couldn’t work out where I’d landed either.
My 100% failure rate with PayPal shows to me that it is not a suitable method of paying for downloadables via 2Checkout (well, I’m sure it’s suitable for thieving little so-and-so’s, even though I’m sure the guy in my case had no intention of cheating me out of a measly $15). So… surely there must be a way to stop that happening, other than a big H1 sign on the site saying, ‘If you try to pay with PayPal, your computer will explode and you’ll get cooties’.
Seriously though, I wouldn’t want to have to tell people that they can’t use PayPal (more info to digest throughout the purchase process) especially if I can’t stop them from using it.
6 Is there a passback parameter that will tell you if a customer has used PayPal? If so, I’d like to be able to use it in future to send their browsers to trojan horse hell via spawning popups purgatory
Quite seriously. If there is one, please let me know. I have a pretty decent system set up and I am now more interested in developing the site as a turnkey solution (and getting my $10 for introducing new 2CO-ers) than I actually am in flogging my best-selling (haha) ebook. I can’t exactly sell it and tell people, “Er, mate, if someone tries to pay with a dodgy PayPal account, you’re stuffed because 2CO will authorise it…”
Is there any documentation about how to run demo transactions through PayPal? If we can’t do anything about PP, it would be good if we can at least use a passback parameter (even better, a simple API) to withhold delivery of electronic goods until payment is FULLY cleared.
You’re very welcome for the kind words
I’m still looking for a good excuse to call support again 
I’d like to point out to anyone who has read this far – I LIKE 2Checkout and nobody has paid me to say that
In my brief experience with PayPal, the staff were arrogant and obnoxious. It seemed as if they thought they could hold me in contempt for living in Russia, just because The Almighty PayPal says it’s forbidden territory. One guy actually snorted down the phone when I asked why I should automatically have my account frozen if I accessed it from Russia.
Even though I only put a few dollars through now and again, 2Checkout treat me with civility and courtesy. Yep, even when I rant at them bitterly for sleeping with the enemy
Email support has left a bit of a bad taste, but the phone support has varied from good to brilliant in the few times I’ve used it. I won’t go into details, but the logic the lady used to resolve my situation the other night was based on something simple and human that you couldn’t expect PayPal to do in aeons.
I’ve noticed (I think) that problems I’ve ranted about in the forum have even been rectified fairly quickly. If I’m right about this, then that’s pretty darn cool. Though it would be better if they weren’t there… although it’s strangely nice to feel ‘involved’.
This, I think is exactly the draw to 2Checkout for small-timers like me. You don’t need to be Dell to be treated decently.
It would be a shame to lose that.
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Muhahaha…
I only just read those Rollout Notes
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We really need you to fix users permissions/roles asap. The users have full permissions now, it is impossible to work… And I promise, we’ll bring lots of new customers to 2CO if you’ll fix your user permissions feature. There should be users with permissions to see the info, but do not change it, for example, can see all payments, but can not cancel/refund.