Tuesday, January 08, 2013

2Checkout - The Worst Experience Your Customers will Have?

I've just the better part of an hour trying to give away my money. Unfortunately, the web hosting company I use has hired 2Checkout (or 2CO) to process their recurring billing.  My credit card has expired, and so I got a friendly message from 2Checkout reminding me to update my credit card info.  

"To have these charges post to a different card (or update your expiration date, etc.), please enter your new billing information using the link below. You will be prompted to enter the first 6 and last 2 digits of the previous credit card."

I arrive at the page, and I read, "
"If you would like to review an order, print an invoice, stop your recurring billing or update your billing information for a specific order, use the order look up form below..."

  So I do use the order look up form below, and I find my order!  BUT, there is NO WAY to enter my new billing information. All I can do is "print" the order.

I tried 3 different browsers just to be sure that I was not missing some Adobe Flash component or something. Big fail.

No problem, I thought. I'll just call these friendly people on the phone number they included in the email:  Toll-free in U.S. & Canada: 1.877.294.0273 

They must want to talk to me or they wouldn't include a toll free phone number, right?

After navigating their menu system, I finally dead ended at a message that said to accomplish any number of things (including updating my information) I should use their terrific online help system.

So to recap:

  • Vendor works hard to sign up a customer who is willing to pay them money each month indefinitely
  • 2CO detects customer's credit card is about to expire
  • 2CO involves customer in a frustrating cycle of fakeout, where they are unable to update their credit card
  • Customer says fuck it, and goes somewhere else.
  • Vendor loses customer
  • Both 2CO and Vendor eventually go out of business.


If I were considering using 2CO as a payment vendor, I would be very concerned about customer loss from such a crap process.   If customers can't even update their recurring billing information, then there is NO place for 2CO in internet order processing.  The bigger question is why does 2CO allow this crap process to continue? It's so clearly obvious. Isn't there a product manager somewhere who actually tests this stuff out and measures for customer's ability to perform some very basic functions on 2CO, like updating their credit card?

If 2CO doesn't want to talk to buyers to help them out, then why even include their phone number?

If you're looking for a payments processor, I would move on. 2CO does not appear to be long for this world if they can't get this right.