I ordered 1 couch, I paid for 1 couch, I was delivered 1 couch. I was delivered 1 more couch a week later. I called to explain the error and they came and took 1 couch. I received notice that I needed to schedule delivery of 1 couch. I called and got the delivery of 1 couch cancelled. I received notice of a refund for 1 couch. I called to explain that I needed to pay for 1 couch. I authorized Amazon to charge me again for my 1 couch I was sitting on.
Each time I spoke to Amazon I was given a $75 credit. I still have never been charged for my 1 couch.
For example I once couldn't figure out how to build a table right, and I hopped on the phone with their customer service department and they refund it half of the price of the table. The same thing happened where I had a monitor which 8 months after I purchased it started having problems, they just refunded half the price.
I'm pretty sure this only works for me because I spend at least $1,500 a month via Amazon, but even then it's business genius to operate like this. Many retailers would rather leave you out to dry, for example I purchased some shoes found they didn't fit and I was shocked when I simply couldn't return them. Guess I'll never go to that store again.
What are you buying such that you're spending at least $18,000 a year on Amazon?
I know a story of a guy who tried to sell a product via MediaMarkt. (A somewhat big German retailer) You have to take everything unsold back. They only pay you after 6 month. The world for a small retailer is usually the other way around. Pay upfront and sit on unsold stock. MediMarkt is small in comparison to Amazon. That is why they don't care if you tell them 10 month later that you don't like your "new" TV. It's not their loss.
I got zero help with the software issue, but they sent me a new card. I sold it on Ebay for ~$70 though so I did not complain. I solved the driver issue myself.
At this point, I obviously found my originals. So I called Apple to try and send back the 3 extras they sent me (I would still have my originals + the replacements I paid for). They were unable to coordinate a return, told me to keep all of them.
I now have 7 apple airpod buds.
I sent my payment via regular mail. 1 month later still don't have my registration renewal, so I start worrying. I call my bank to block the check, and go to DMV offices in person and make a payment using a credit card.
After a couple of weeks I receive 2 letters from DMV the same day. One saying I double paid, and hence they are now include a check with my payment back. And another one saying my original check has bounced and that now I will have to make the payment using cashier's check and pay an extra $20 for the bounced check.
I get a cashier check for the amount plus the $20 and make yet another payment.
A couple of weeks later I receive another letter from DMV with a check returning the $20 penalty.
So overall in the end we did balance things out, but took a while :D
I had simply made a transcription error on the account number and the letter took 1.5mos to get back. That was a few days after the deadline.
Then a couple days later, the package turned up after all. Turned out, the building staff hand-wrote the wrong apartment number in. I guess it took a couple of days for whoever was in the other apartment to get it, open it, realize it wasn't their stuff, send it back to the building staff, they figure out what went wrong, and tell me to pick it up.
So now I have the package and the refund. I spent another 10 or 20 minutes on Amazon trying to find an option for I got the package after all. Couldn't find anything. Gave up and left it alone. I guess Amazon would rather let me keep the money than bother building the infrastructure for that case. I have a feeling it would take even longer to figure out a phone number to call and wait on hold to talk to a person who had the authority to do something not on a pre-set list.
We eventually had Amazon ban FedEx as a shipper to our address.
They weren't prepared for the server crush. I made nine attempts to create an account, before succeeding. Each time the attempt hung in mid-session. Once I got far enough to see my preferred login was not available. In my frustration I gave that presumed stranger a referral credit.
Then I got billed for nine accounts. There were unique transaction numbers, but my credit card company didn't use them, and couldn't keep track of otherwise identical transactions.
To this day I want Earthlink to rot in hell for how they treated me throughout this conflict. They brought this on themselves. They accused me of fraud for the unintended self-referral. As Don Johnson once said in a less safe-for-work context, we all rely on the kindness of strangers.
I got a free couch and over $200 in credit for my trouble from Amazon.
1) Vendor agrees to to NET 60, but begins to display warnings to end users on day 30.
2) We want to purchase 100 licenses in bulk, but vendor will only sell individual licenses directly to each user, who must pay using the vendor's payment system, with no exceptions or alternatives.
3) Vendor does not have a method to process payment for multiple invoices combined in one check.
4) Vendor sends invoice to wrong account at the same enterprise (way too common).
What's frustrating about these examples is that there is no sales pitch needed; we've already decided to purchase the product. Taking our money shouldn't be the hardest part.
1. Launch a SaaS app that people like, with self-service signup and monthly billing by credit card.
2. Continue to grow and become more successful.
3. New leadership comes in, and decides that the path to growth is hiring a bunch of sales people and selling to "enterprises" instead of self service people with credit cards.
4. The sales people start selling to enterprises and promising terms that not only can the billing system not support, but that engineering hasn't even been asked to look into yet.
5. Yell at engineering for not "supporting our sales team" and try to get them to fix it, without slipping other feature launches, and without hiring more engineers.
6. Look like an idiot to all of your enterprise customers because you're selling them a product that was never designed for their needs, and without appropriate engineering scale to change it.
Never build the payment system tight coupled to the rest. Humans need to be able to overrule anything, anytime.
This should be a rule of thumb for everything.
Oof.
I recall one occasion in a small retail store years ago where I got so frustrated at being ignored by the employees, despite already knowing what I wanted and I just needed someone to fetch it from the back. Eventually I held my wallet aloft and asked why nobody here would take my money.
Shut up and take my money, indeed.
There's also the uncomfortable situation where the management model at a company assumes that every sale is the result of customer service, and any time you sell yourself they have to wrangle the system while you stand there watching. I suspect that more companies do this than I think, and some salespeople are doing the wrangling without alerting me to their activity. They are just much better at passing for normal than some other places.
One thing retail consultants do is to watch people checking out and note the obstacles. A classic problem is checkout clutter - impulse buy items at the checkout getting in the way of putting merchandise on the counter. In stores without carts, checkout clutter reduces sale amount, because customers subconsciously don't want to reach the counter and have no place to put the stuff. The Gap, which got this, always had big, clear counters. Bed, Bath and Beyond doesn't get this.
Eventually I held my wallet aloft and asked why nobody here would take my money.
I had an experience like that decades ago, in a large J.C. Penny in New Jersey. I'd just moved to the area and was buying a whole set of linens, pillows, and towels in the middle of the day. So I had an armload of merchandise stacked above my head. I reached a counter in the multi-floor department store but there were no staff around. No one on the whole floor.
I saw a phone behind the counter, so I dialed 0 and got someone. I told them I was at the checkout in Linens and there was no one on the sales floor.
Several minutes later, about six people showed up. Not clerks. The store manager, some junior people, and a grey-haired executive in an expensive suit who was deferred to by the others. By now, there were two other customers lined up behind me. The manager sent off some of the junior people to search for the missing clerk, and they came back empty. The store manager looked scared. The grey-haired executive didn't say a word to his people. He just unlocked the cash register and handled the transaction himself. He did two transactions before someone was found to take over.
I suspected I had just seen the end of some careers.
JB Hifi, Harvey Norman, Myer, David Jones, Bing Lee, Anaconda and more - I've walked in knowing what I want, finding a sales person to let me buy it is near impossible. When you do find someone who works there "Oh, sorry, I don't work in that department" is the response half the time, and "Sorry, I'm with another customer at the moment, I'll be with you shortly" is most of the remaining times.
Purchasing online for 'click and collect' isn't necessarily any better - I've stood waiting at the collection desk for the better part of an hour while someone goes to find thing that I've already paid for and been told is ready for pickup just an hour prior.
Retailers have gone to try and compete with online by trying to match prices rather than just better service.
If I'm walking into a store it's because I either want it now, damn the premium, or need to see/feel it to know if it's right.
BIZARRO
This has happened to me repeatedly at Apple stores in NYC, any time I've tried to purchase a phone or laptop. It's an extremely frustrating experience, especially for a relatively large purchase. I'd happily wait in a line, just give me some form of ordered queue please. Deli counters can handle this, so why can't a $2 trillion company?
Sometimes its difficult to part with your money
Basic monthly SaaS subscriptions charged automatically to a credit card? Simple. Selling physical products with a shopping card system? Harder but plenty of existing systems that do it well. Anything else is surprisingly hard, especially at enterprise scale with the level of customization that introduces.
IMO there's a good startup opportunity for a no code billing system that is highly customizable, auditable, and testable. Seeing the level of customization that's often needed I don't know if it's even possible.
Even that's no simple anymore.
If you're in the EU, there's new laws around subscriptions, so you have to be able to handle a customer being forced to renew their subscription by re-inputting their security code.
So now Stripe (not their fault really) has a ridiculously complicated paymentintent pathway that's worse than paypal, forcing you to send users to their site, plus you have to write a whole pathway for if a subscription gets flagged for renewal.
#hownottousetwitter
Summary: Salesforce acquires heroku and alarming billing errors ensue.
Step 1. "We bought this company because we love the product, nothing is changing"
-- At this point, smart employees (that have been here before) without retention bonuses are leaving
Step 2. "We are going to combine some processes, to lower our costs"
--There goes many of the backend people that actually knew the how/why of the system.
Step 3. "Our customers love our support and development, and are willing to pay a bit more. We can cut back/outsource some development/support costs, to increase profit. Just a bit, to make our money back"
-- At this point, if your retention bonus is fulfilled, you are gone
Step 4. "This quarterly profit isn't high enough to meet analysts expectations. We are cutting 10% from every group's budgets"
--at this point, the only people left are those that have no other options.
Step 5. "We have problems in Engineering, Support, and operations. Lets outsource it, so we don't keep having to deal with all this turnover".
Step 6. "Our sales are a fraction of their former level. Lets take this huge pile of cash we made, and buy another company. We love their product!"
Because strangling an initiative by withdrawing all funding isn't saying 'no' I guess? I'll never understand how that works.
Usually that squeeze happens in the second fiscal year, and in some cases the 'combine processes' step is characterized as a carrot instead of a stick.
When it was announced we were being acquired, one of the first questions was "What are the retention bonuses".
"We don't plan to have any retention bonuses" is the answer that came back from the new owners.
A few months later I'm talking to a VP of something-or-other in the acquiring organisation who's commenting "Yes, we've noticed you're having a lot of people departing. Company X who we acquired a few years ago had the same thing, we're not sure why".
This was while being told "nothing will change for you", to be immediately followed by "We're getting rid of X and Y and Z and changing work flexibility policies."
Too many great products ruined in the pursuit of growth and greed.
You pay via bank transfer after receiving a bill. A proper, written, paper, tax-legal bill. One that gets a few stamps and signatures by your accounting department, by the department that ordered said software and maybe internal IT. Only then is the transfer issued.
If a vendor cannot be bothered to send a bill properly, well, it isn't worth the hassle. Only hilarity will ensue, as can be seen from the OP.
These tools can also offer virtual cards, auto coding of expenses, and spending caps by card.
ACH is better (lower cost) for the vendor but a proper card-based spend mgmt setup might be better for most buyers.
Billing systems are a different beast from point of sale, but it always sounded to me like a similar philosophy ruled both realms.
Eventually the system started writing broken BACS tapes and I had to fix the 6-7 months backlog of direct debits.
Neither the Company Secretary or I got even a thank you for fixing the problems.
Ok I did put Jack Scofield's (prominent uk tech journalists) bank account into the red :-)
e.g. the cloud interface and price list had different SKUs. Much googling later I found some sketchy site that had attempted to map them grid style but still had lots of "???" where they just don't fkin map.
I was ready for per core billing but not that.
Wouldn't let you click create because its complaining about missing fields (telephone or sector or something).
Except the form literally doesn't have a fields for that stuff.
We also had tons of issues with duplicates because well...global org & suddenly thousands of inexperienced people try to jam stuff on there. So the guy in Egypt links his stuff to Australia because many countries have a "Road Construction Ltd" etc. And then the sales figures pull through cross jurisdication etc. And then the guy in Australia deletes it cause its messing up his dashboard. Just carnage.
TBF I knew our copy of SF was very heavily customized (big contract) & I could sorta see the vision behind it. Perhaps the roll-out was just overly ambitious (bad ERP rollout style) rather than the software inherently bad.
If you are getting slightly below the competence you need to be effective, and can push the cost of the friction onto your customers, you're coming out ahead of the game.
https://www.salesforce.com/products/sales-cloud/tools/cpq-so...
For a short while after the term was coined it even had a Wikipedia page, but it was eventually deleted for not meeting the Notability guidelines. The current Wikipedia page for Enterprise software doesn't even have a hint of criticism of the genre. I did find this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209
Much ink has been spilled over the antipattern of enterprise software arising from procurement failure by having the design focused on pleasing the people who in practice never actually use it.
Billing and collection being out to screw you over is a cliche. Especially the infamous cases when they screw up and hassle you for bills not owed. It appears there was a marriage between the despised.
From the thread, this seems more like the problems you get with SaaS when it is run with minimal customer service.
It's way harder than it looks, but many places don't even think about it in the early stages because they want that core competency built; but they completely miss that being able to send accurate bills and invoices is undeniably core competency. Do not be one of these places, and learn to recognize the warning signs.
(disclosure: worked on a competing product to Auth0 as acmelogin.com)
BUT the one part I'm confused on: for January - April of 2021, were you actually not billed $4k each month?
If you weren't billed for 4 months, wouldn't you have noticed that when you look at your finances each month?
Note: I'm assuming $4k will be one of your larger monthly expenses as a non-VC startup. And even if $4k/mo isn't a huge expense, making sure it's paid is in the critical path of an essential service you have. Now, I'm not saying that a small (small as in # of employees) startup must verify that each vendor is charging them the correct amount each and every month, but if you had previous pain with them, adding a monthly TODO seems like a good idea to protect your business.
If the seller screws up this or that, it's an immediate 10% discount. When it hits the bottom line where the CFO can see it, then it has to be fixed.
It seems outrageously overpriced.
Ha!
Yes, yes it is!
