“Google Checkout” A Self-Service Online Payment
Following their offer for extra Google Storage, I thought regardless of the concept I do need that extra storage, and it’s not expensive anyhow, $20/year for 6 GB. Better than having several emails to check or start deleting old ones. So I went to their page and Ohh… I have to use Google Checkout again! I have spoke before about my bad experience with it. But then again, now I am buying directly from Google so it shouldn’t be a problem. I placed the order and got email confirmation followed quickly by another saying your credit card was declined. I figured the old one expired and my CVC has changed with the new card. So I updated it and tried again, but I still got misleading message on top saying you have to put valid credit card. Is that the old message or the new one after second attempt? I tried again for a third time and still no update on their log. It only shows one time declined. I contacted Google Checkout Support directly then to rectify the issue and see what I needed to do, as I am sure my card is valid. I use it for Google AdWords anyway.
The upgrade attempt and contact all happened on 10th Aug, and there was no feedback from them. Nothing until 13th Aug! That’s a long time for online payment support from someone like Google. But what was the email about?
“Order canceled – Because you haven’t provided valid credit card information in response to the email Google sent to you on Aug 10, your order has been cancelled.”
What! But I have already contacted them for support 3 days back. Why would they ignore my email and wait until transaction expires? This is really bad service I thought, but decided to give them another chance. I sent a follow up email the same day and up till now I did not get any feedback. See the log below:
I still remember when I heard about possible Google online payment solution, and then saw their demo for the first time. I thought WOW, this is gonna be good. I told all my friends about it. My first experience was bad buying from a merchant, and now this. For an online payment solution the two most important factors are: 1) security, and 2) customer service. At least I’m sure they lack the second now. Even though the process of registration and payment is very much convenient, probably the best I came across, it still doesn’t do me any good until I get my transaction through.
Mind you I am one of the biggest Google fans and I did not wish to publish something like this, however my experience did show me Google really needs to improve on their customer service level. They are holding up now because they are the # 1, but that doesn’t mean they should overlook customer service quality. You lose loyalty, customers will only wait until second best is there to try it. The Low and bad response is something, but in this case, it is complete ignorance I am sorry to say. It is really a do-it yourself self-service thing.
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Comments
Firstly if you notice the message “seller contacted” means that your message did not go to Google Checkout but instead to the merchant, Google paid storage. This is why Google Checkout hasn’t responded. I have no idea why Google paid storage hasn’t responded. They should have at least responded to direct you to Google Checkout support.
The payment declined message that you got indicates that your bank declined the credit card. You should contact your aquiring bank (the phone number on the back of the credit card) to find out why they declined the transaction.
The Google Checkout help center is there for a reason. If
http://checkout.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43068&topic=
doesn’t answer your question, try the “contact us” link below that to contact Google Checkout support.
So, I found a small way around GCO’s ‘one time’ $10 discount(by signing up using friends and families names and my other email accts)and was looking for a battery for a phone of mine.
I found a site which uses GCO and had it for under $20, which would’ve come to about $8.90 shipped with the $10 discount.
However, I signed up for the new acct(so I thought), but the discount didn’t show up. Weird, I thought, so I hit back on my browser on the last screen prior to confirming/placing the order.
Well, low and behold, I checked my card recently and found an $18.90 charge for this item, which even the company has NO RECORD OF ME ORDERING. I called my card company, I called the company in question, but as mentioned above, the company has NO RECORD of me.
Admittedly, what I was doing was sorta wrong, using multiple email accts and my friends and families names(with their permission though), but how does one ‘order’ something without hitting ‘place order’?
Hmm… that’s very weird. Anyways, Google Checkout is one very thing very far from reliable. It’s hardly Alpha as I see it.
This is really weired and bad coming from google, specially that you already use the same Credit Card to pay them for google AdWords !
Being a large company doesn’t excuse not giving proper support for all their customers, but Google is a very large company with an insanely large number of customers. And I can see that they don’t want to hire support employees for that insane number, in stead they are trying to automate everything, they are programming AI agents and making them support their clients .. because as I can see from the log screen capture on your post, their interfaces are very human and easy to understand .. it’s like an employee is explaining to you in details what happened to your transaction..
hmm in other words, you can forget about a human calling you or responding to ur problem from google, at least not in a timely manner ..