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My Recent Experience With Square

jasongullickson.posterous.com

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Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#81

Post by eridius »

bosch wrote: post #70
debacle wrote: post #48

Throughout the entire exchange, Square is relatively prompt and incredibly informative and professional. This guy doesn't know how electronic payments work, and has clearly never had to deal with managing a merchant account before.

Irrespective of if the author was correct in his use of the service, how is not replying for days prompt and how is tersely worded e-mails informative and professional? The whole thing reminded me of PayPal.

What do you mean? Re-reading the post, Square always responded by the next business day. There was no "days" wait here. The only confusion was the OP tried to make it sound worse by saying "over 24 hours", but all that means is Square emailed him in the morning on one day, and on the afternoon on the next day.

This part is also weird. He received a reply dated April 20th. He then says "the next morning" he received another email about the withdrawn funds, and he replied. Except his reply is dated the 24th. I have no idea what to think about this. Deliberate misrepresentation of facts?

A bit later on we do finally see a multi-day gap in Square's responses, where he emailed them on the 25th and Square replied on the 30th. However, Jason's email didn't actually contain any questions or actionable statements, only complaints and accusations of "thinly veiled threats". So I don't see the response gap here as being significant.

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#82

Post by jasongullickson »

This is simply a precautionary tale; if you don't mind being treated this way, by all means continue using Square.

I didn't, and I was unable to resolve the situation by working with Square, so I shared my experience, warts and all, with others in the hope that others can learn from my experience.

Could I have been more eloquent and professional? Certainly. But this is something I was dealing with in my "spare" time, (and for the record, as donated time and a favor to a nonprofit). If this was a business venture it would have been handled much differently, but I don't think Square is exclusively for serious business use (at least that's not what I get from their marketing).

So please feel free to criticize my actions; had I ran across a similar story myself before I found myself in this situation, it might have turned out better, so I feel it is worth taking a few shots if it helps someone else down the road.

Keep on hackin'

Jason

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#83

Post by eridius »

adgar wrote: post #16
bmj1 wrote: post #5

I have to disagree (perhaps unfashionably) with the author's sentiment and the comment below "I really like Square, but I always have this feeling that this company is going to be oe (sic) more paypal and with this story it´s confirmed." - The customer service was pretty responsive and reasonably polite for a very fast growing company. - The author notes he has paid Square hundreds of dollars in transactions fees so…

You seem to be giving Square far, far more credit than any business deserves. I suspect it is because Square is an HN darling, but hey, to each his own. I take serious issue with your characterization that those Square responses were "pretty responsive" and "reasonably polite." * They took several days to respond to a time-sensitive billing issue * They claimed to provide support they could not and did not provide *…

> * They took several days to respond to a time-sensitive billing issue

I just responded to someone else making the same claim up above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3956896), but no they didn't. They always responded the next day.

> * They claimed to provide support they could not and did not provide

What do you mean?

> * Instead of owning any responsibility, they blamed the customer, several times

They did? I must have missed that. All I see are statements of facts from Square. Maybe you're misinterpreting that given that Jason did in fact screw up.

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#84

Post by eridius »

leejw00t354 wrote: post #15

I think Square could have tried to be more understanding of this use case. He did clearly explain that the linked account didn't keep a balance and that he was willing to pay the negative balance in his Square account with other sources. I don't see this as shockingly poor customer service, but Square should have just disabled the automatic debiting on his account as he was a long time trust worthy customer.

Trustworthy? Jason already demonstrated he is not trustworthy, since he failed to keep the necessary amount of funds in his linked account to cover any chargebacks that may occur. He screwed up, and he expected Square to pay for it.

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#85

Post by sirclueless »

gravitronic wrote: post #45

Sounds like Square has generic customer service reps handling the incoming queue of service requests item by item. Would it have a better result in terms of responsiveness if each new case was handled by a single CS rep until completed so that every response to an issue does not have to pass the entire queue before being dealt with? Or would that increase net response time?

It's a well-known fact that CS requests have a really high abandonment rate. It saves a lot of money to hold off on answering requests for as long as possible, because it weeds out the non-urgent requests, and makes people loath to create more.

If every request takes at least 24 hours, then a sizeable segment of the population will give up trying unless something really big comes up. Responding quickly sends the wrong signal that CS reps are an effective way to solve issues and your volume will probably shoot way up.

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#86

Post by aneth »

tatsuke95 wrote: post #78
aneth wrote: post #34

I have to land squarely on Square's side on this one. As far as I can tell, Square has handled this matter exactly as I would expect and hope. They communicated professionally and clearly with Jason. Jason responded with empty threats and demands, and clearly does not understand or respect his responsibilities in his business relationship. Getting money quickly from a merchant account is a privilege, not a right. Tha…

> " Getting money quickly from a merchant account is a privilege, not a right." No, it's a service, provided by Square, that you pay for . Whether Jason is at fault or not, he's disgruntled and public. That's never good news, especially with companies who deal in something as sensitive as payments. Square built a great product, but they are in a very competitive space.

> No, it's a service, provided by Square, that you pay for.

Just because you pay a company doesn't mean you have an unconditional right to do anything you want with a company's resources. You do not pay for unconditional money from customers via Square. Part of what you pay for, in fact, are the resources Square requires to defend disputed charges on your behalf. Part of what you agree to when you join Square is to comply with chargeback procedures.

You pay for the service, yes. You also agree to operate within certain parameters, and don't have a right to demand anything you want just because you are a paying customer.

This seems to be a common fallacy on HN - that any paid customer is deserving of bend-over-backward support, even if the payment amount was less than $1 - Square's net revenue from this transaction.

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#87

Post by pm24601 »

parfe wrote: post #24
pm24601 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you think it is a good idea to let random outside parties dip into his business's working capital? Ooops sorry about withdrawing $10,000 instead of $100. What's a decimal place among friends? Hope you can still make that tax payment and payroll while we futzy around on our end.

Except it isn't a random outside party. It's his credit card processor and it wasn't a random amount, it was the specific amount under dispute.

Yes. A credit card processor that said they wouldn't act while he was disputing a charge --- but oops did. A credit card processor that makes it hard to contact them. A credit card processor that cannot be bothered to pick up the phone and call the customer.

Might as well be random.

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#88

Post by rralian »

rglover wrote: post #72

I didn't bother finishing this because the author persistently claims the Square reps have a rude tone when quite the opposite is taking place. This email stood out for me: For the record I have never received such "guilty until proven innocent" treatment from a company before and until now have sung the praises of square and happily paid the fees associated with your service. If this issue is not resolved immediatel…

If you would have finished it, you would have found that Square's service was professional throughout. They never treat him as if he is "guilty until proven innocent". The rep just tries to explain to him why repeatedly sending emails will actually make their response take longer, and it's reasonable.

She could have used the passive voice in her explanation, "when someone [blah blah] they will naturally inhibit", which would be harder to read as hostile. But that's a pretty subtle point that I don't think can be expected for someone who is likely judged on responses/hour and messages in queue. Plus, he was being pretty hostile leading up to this, so I think her response shows poise. These reps are humans after all, and they deal with irate and unreasonable people all the time.

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#89

Post by koeselitz »

I'm of two minds on this; I think maybe Jason could have understood how chargebacks work a little better - but at the same time, I think Square could probably streamline this process.

Most of all, this bit of one of the emails from Square kind of set off alarms in my head as bad practice:

"It is our pleasure to inform you that this inquiry has been preliminarily closed in your favor. While this is promising, it is also conditional. Your funds are eligible for automated release on or around 30 April 2012 once additional confirmation is secured."

I don't think "preliminary closure" of a chargeback even makes sense, does it? Either it's closed or it's not closed. I understand that they might have various steps in the inquiry, but letting the customer know ahead of time that everything is probably going to work out well for them, apparently in order to soothe them, is setting the situation up very badly in cases where the preliminary positive resolution doesn't actually get confirmation later on. What's more, it's clear that this didn't even set the correct expectation in the event of a positive finding. They named a date, and then promptly failed to meet it.

If I were designing a system to do this, it seems like it would be best just to let the customer know you're inquiring, that it may be a few weeks, and that they must keep a certain amount of money in their account until the inquiry is over.

(Obviously I haven't designed such a system, and I know it's difficult. This approach just seems inevitably problematic to me, though.)

Re: My Recent Experience With Square

#90

Post by Uchikoma »

aneth wrote: post #34

I have to land squarely on Square's side on this one. As far as I can tell, Square has handled this matter exactly as I would expect and hope. They communicated professionally and clearly with Jason. Jason responded with empty threats and demands, and clearly does not understand or respect his responsibilities in his business relationship. Getting money quickly from a merchant account is a privilege, not a right. Tha…

While you're post is indeed lengthy, it twists the facts a little bit.

1.) They did not reply in a timely manor. They did not honor their self imposed SLA of 24 hours response time. 2.) They threatened him that more mails from him would get him marked as a spammer so he should shut up. 3.) Although they told him repeatedly that he needs not do do anything to get his money back, they did not give the money back into his bank account in the end.

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