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Comments
It costs part of the fee, and with slim profit margins that VirMach has it's understandable.
The add funds page clearly says they don't offer refunds on deposits.
I recall someone sending few tens of Ks via paypal by "mistake". People can be real dumb at times.
I don't want to get their PayPal suspended. I don't want this thread to blow up and stay at the top of LET for the next week either. (OK maybe I do for the entertainment value.) I just want @VirMach to do the right thing.
So @VirMach can refund the full amount minus $0.30 or so?
Yeah, but the OP clicked the wrong button. "Customer First" mentality y'all.
After reading @virmach response i gotta say they handled it properly with the refund after informing the customer of their mistake and potential associated costs. I Appreciate the deposit option on all hosts but it's obvious what's going to happen when you desposit. I also can't fault virmach for giving limited support on such low plans. Buyshared @frantech i would say though still provides beyond excellent service despite their $5-15 a year plans so it's definitely possible although costly to do so.
Personally if i was them I would avoid they crazy low plans and in particular stop advertising special deals on Chinese forums. Its obvious individuals from that nation will tend to have a communication issue and potentially make mistakes on a. English platform. Perhaps translating the platform would be a good idea if your going to target that client base.
Pretty sure they confirmed the guy had been offered a refund some time ago.
It's not free in terms of fees and the time it takes to handle/process the refund. Mistake or not on the OP's part, there is a cost involved and the OP must expect to cover the cost of his own error. Someone crashed into the back of my car not long ago, and I'm sure it was an innocent mistake, but someone had to pay for the repairs and it shouldn't be me.
I always get PayPal fees refunded when I refund a transaction. Am I overlooking something?
Anyway, @clouvider points out something people too often forget: When choosing the reason for the dispute or chargeback, the only available options will be fraudulent claims.
Nailed it. Everybody wants Chinese money but don't want to handle the customers. Something easily handled with translations or policies translated that are available to the customer.
Look at Hostigation- they got Chinese staff real quick after noticing the trend with customers
Variable portion is refunded, fixed portion is always kept.
Which reply?
I asked whether you're impersonating Mr. Torvalds.
Wait.... hold up but the limit for the balance on a single account is $200USD only:
How does one withdraw several thousand dollars from you if the limit is only $200?
Durr, I dunno. Maybe they added limits after getting fucked for a few hundred bucks worth of VPS that burned up their /24 trying to buy hushpuppies?
This is in no way a violation. We are simply stating that (1) for credit/debit card, the customer does not have to leave our site and (2) for Bitcoin, advertising a Coinbase referral link to get $10 off a deposit.
We aren't stating that PayPal charges, on average, 2-3% more in fees and we aren't charging the customer these fees. Even if we did, I'm pretty sure PayPal does not mind a payment processing fee involved with performing fraud check on the order (which is required for PayPal but not Bitcoin) and manually having to go through PayPal payments to ensure the customer information is correct/valid.
We did have a message that an invoice would be generated. I don't understand why customers would want an invoice generated to add funds if they do not want to add funds. As I stated before, the default message stated that the invoice would be generated, where a customer expects another step. However, I don't understand the reasoning behind generating an invoice you do not want to pay. In addition, WHMCS does not get rid of "Add Funds" invoices by default. That's why the original message even says that the invoice needs to be paid. We also do not write a message that they will be taken to PayPal to complete their payment anywhere (as far as I know.)
So even if the message is confusing, the text abot the invoice being generated, it needing to be paid, and the deposit being non-refundable should have been enough to deter anyone from not wanting to add funds to not press the button.
In this case, the customer was also previously given a warning that the PayPal account was linked and would be used directly in the future. I'll see if we can make this step more clear as well with additional warnings when it is set up by the customer.
In regards to PayPal, they do keep a $0.30 fee on all refunds. The percentage fee is returned, while the $0.30 processing fee is not. This is mainly the reason we only have (1) payment refund per customer, also combined with the fact that the 30 cents isn't the main cost. It's the manual task of an agent refunding the payment.
It costs about a little over a dollar to process each refund properly. If you also count in everyone asking questions and getting upset when they are outside of our (fairly generous) one refund / 7 days policy, it shoots up to a few more dollars to deal with each refund. In this specific case, it's obviously much more than the initial $5 but it's still cheaper than if we made exceptions for every single person (providing refunds whenever it's requested, for any reason.) Especially if the word gets out that we do not enforce any of our policies, as customers will tell their friends or discuss the fact with everyone on a message board (especially in China) and then everyone expects an exception.
The latter is mainly why we suspend & do not refund on abuse. A lot of people get upset and accuse of us of "stealing" their money (even though dealing with their abuse already cost more than the service) but even though it would be less of a headache to just refund abusers, if we refund them they will just come back, abuse, and expect another refund.
We do not want/need "Chinese money" and we definitely cannot afford to provide Chinese support or additional services to Chinese customers. We never anticipated so many Chinese users to be interested in our service, especially since none of our networks are "optimized" and we do not accomodate free changes for GFW blocks, or encourage/attempt to get Chinese customers in any way. This just naturally occured when we posted sales on LET, and we have some Chinese affiliates.
Of course we're not going to reject Chinese orders, or discourage any affiliate from sending us customers (regardless of where the majority of the people reside) but we're also not going to encourage it. I can confidently state that we definitely do not make any profit from Chinese customers (on average for anyone from the country of China; we do have some extremely large clients.) They order our cheapest packages, have the highest transaction fees, the most problems with the services (connection issues), and the biggest language barrier. We also get the most disputes from that region, and the highest expectation of free support (even though most packages are "Limited Support.") So yes, we definitely cannot afford to be more China-friendly at this time. That doesn't mean we do not appreciate their business; it just means we expect all our customers to be realistic with their requests. If your ISP or another website blocks your IP, we charge a fee to manually change your IP. If you make a non-refundable deposit or request your third refund, it may be rejected.
That's the maximum a customer can manually add, for security reasons. We can generate larger add funds invoices for customers. In many cases, customers cannot add funds themselves due to anti-fraud restrictions, so they have to contact us anyway.
The limit is there because WHMCS isn't the smartest with how they process some things. For example, "add funds" does not run through fraud check so it may get abused by fraudsters. We've since sealed all these loopholes but one of them was people adding a large amount of funds, and not using it for whatever reason. Then chargebacks came in and we never even noticed someone clearly used a stolen card to add hundreds of dollars of funds because WHMCS believes it's unnecessary to run adding funds through fraud check.
@VirMach waiting for your early BF deal..
@Virmach why would some customer even want to add several thousands of dollars into a account where they don't earn anything off of? Just keep it in their bank account or something, since it's not being used.
@Virmach pls block anyone shitting in this thread for circumstances beyond control from ordering a VPS in a few weeks. That'll leave more for me. TIA.
How many of those little VPSs you got idling from them anyway? Must be too many. Stop being so greedy and leave some for the rest of us.
If you're not smart enough to not preload with $30,000- you don't need them. You can afford more.
How much do you spend idling at their hosting each year anyway? No one wants to pay more then what's needed.
Just enough to keep my backups and toys running.
Why the heck would you need RAID10 SSD for backups anyway???
Beats me. That's why I go for the cheapest host I never heard of that someone I never heard from but has an old account on LET posted!
Whose your favorite #scam of 201
67?Turdler?
BlortexFold?
Queefhosting?
i812.party?
Why make backups? So you have a extra copy of the files in case the originals get deleted. Oh wait, the backup server failed too. Oh well, time to sign up at another hoster just to get scammed.
You're right, @Edmond-
INTERNET AND HOSTING IS A SCAM!
All about the money...
I left the rest of the conversations on account of most of them being angry rants made while I was frustrated, which kind of embarrassing in hindsight, and also it having limited relevance to this case. It has been added here:https://i.imgur.com/AQ86Y1A.png
I first bought your products a year ago. Things this important surely there's no way I would've missed.
You argue that once an invoice is generated customer must be ready to pay it. Does it ever occur to you that people often change their mind. In this specific case, like I said, I was considering adding funds and expecting not to be billed immediately. Your constant implying that I was lying I DO NOT appreciate at all.
What now? Have I not purchased over $20 of products from you in the last year?
I have been a virmach customer for a year, during this time how many support tickets have I created for all 4 of my products? A total of 5.
And since there's no way for me to know when the supposed pending state will end, what I am supposed to do but to remind you to check it on your end? And if that action would cost me more than the refund, why on earth would I bother talking to you again?(Through your ticket system that it.)
>
Yes, they should be hiring a dedicated account manager for you.
How much profit do you think did they make from you? How much do you think you have cost them in human cost with that ticket and PayPal dispute? People cost money to hire.
@Jameswxx I agree with you. Generate a invoice, if I want it, I pay, if I don't, I let it expire in three days. $10/15min is a bit expensive for support and a bit unreasonable. But why is it still being held by Paypal is my question now. I mean it's closed by you, funds should be released to you.
I'd contact Paypal and ask about the status on the transaction and verify if their statement is correct before replying to their tickets again. If it's being held, ask them to release it, and update the ticket, otherwise there's something wrong and just saying it's $10/reply is completely unreasonable.
Unconsciously
If they are serious, I should be already owing them 5 dollars by now. So at the moment, I'm not expecting any refund.