- Joined
- Apr 5, 2005
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Just thought I'd share this little story.
We've got a little over 500 .nz and .co.nz domains, all consolidated at one particular registrar. Been with them for years. Good service, no problems...
... until I suddenly found out (from experience - there was no warning given) that they've implemented new, hyper-restrictive fraud prevention measures on credit card payments. Nothing over NZ$200 per transaction, with IP blocks and long multi-hour time-outs between successive payments.
Needless to say that makes managing any reasonably sized portfolio a nightmare because that only allows for 10 names to be renewed at a time, and it's literally a gamble when their system will "allow" the next payment to pass through. Plus if I put through too many tiny transactions for the same merchant, OUR bank will start to kick up a fuss as we'll trigger their fraud checking algorithms.
They don't have Paypal, nor are they willing to join it, according to their support team. Their only "solution" was to ask for international bank wires.
Needless to say, our 500 domains are walking out of there as fast as we can transfer them. We may not have been huge customers, but that's still well over NZ$10,000/year in business they've just lost (and in the NZ domain market that's a much bigger deal than in the UK, given its relatively small size).
TAKE-AWAYS
1. If you're going to make changes that you know will inconvenience customers, warn them in advance
2. Have a viable alternative ready
3. Realise that a solution that works in quantities of 1 may break down horribly in large quantities, and plan accordingly
4. Account for past behaviour - if you know that customer X has paid without a flaw for years and years, find a way to specifically approve/whitelist them.
We've got a little over 500 .nz and .co.nz domains, all consolidated at one particular registrar. Been with them for years. Good service, no problems...
... until I suddenly found out (from experience - there was no warning given) that they've implemented new, hyper-restrictive fraud prevention measures on credit card payments. Nothing over NZ$200 per transaction, with IP blocks and long multi-hour time-outs between successive payments.
Needless to say that makes managing any reasonably sized portfolio a nightmare because that only allows for 10 names to be renewed at a time, and it's literally a gamble when their system will "allow" the next payment to pass through. Plus if I put through too many tiny transactions for the same merchant, OUR bank will start to kick up a fuss as we'll trigger their fraud checking algorithms.
They don't have Paypal, nor are they willing to join it, according to their support team. Their only "solution" was to ask for international bank wires.
Needless to say, our 500 domains are walking out of there as fast as we can transfer them. We may not have been huge customers, but that's still well over NZ$10,000/year in business they've just lost (and in the NZ domain market that's a much bigger deal than in the UK, given its relatively small size).
TAKE-AWAYS
1. If you're going to make changes that you know will inconvenience customers, warn them in advance
2. Have a viable alternative ready
3. Realise that a solution that works in quantities of 1 may break down horribly in large quantities, and plan accordingly
4. Account for past behaviour - if you know that customer X has paid without a flaw for years and years, find a way to specifically approve/whitelist them.
