Good afternoon Everyone, I have reviewed the list of Merchant Plug-ins for Amember and I have visited each site looking for an appropriate credit card vendor for my needs. My search results have led me to: www.netbilling.com Before I sign up with this vendor, I wanted to solicit some feed back from the members of this forum. (Amember Alex, please feel free to comment also for a tech support point of view.) Question #1: Does anyone have personal experience with this vendor's services? Question #2: Are there any intergration set up issues in the beginning with Amember? Question #3: Are there any on-going re-occurring billing issues with Amember? For Alex: Question #4: www.NetBilling.com advertises that they offer membership web site administration services. Are you familar with their system? Thank you very much in advance for your response. Hersh
2. No. 3. No. 4. As you can guess I personally never used this system I believe it is something simple that will allow you to add users on signup for recurring billing, and disable on subscription expiration, and manage .htpasswd file on your host. I don't think it will do something else.
I don't likem. I've dealt with them on several occasions for various issues and their staff seems incompetant. Their policies are pretty stiff as well. They don't seem to evaluate customer questions to any level of detail but instead read off of checklists. This mindset seems to go all the way up to the president of the company who prefers to refer your questions to one of his staff (while he promises you an answer from one of them). ...a checklist answer at least. I wouldn't count on them if I ever ran into a technical problem that requires more investigation than a reference to one of their pre-made manuals or FAQs.
yatesf, Thank you very much for your feedback. I would like to ask a few follow up questions to your reply. Question #1: How long (over what period of time) have you dealt with them? Question #2: And, when was your last bad experience? With my questions, I'm trying to determine if their poor customer is a constant issue or is the company trying to make improvements. Question #3: Which company do you currently use or who would you recommend? Thank you in advance. -- Hersh
This was over a period of about one week. I was considering coming in as a new merchant, but evaluating them on customer service based on how they handled some issues with one of my credit card accounts mistakenly being globally blacklisted by a single rogue vendor, which in turned caused any and all related information about me to trigger credit card declines with all other netbilling vendors who I tried to do business with. I tried to have them explain why it is that if one vendor blacklists you, you will never be able to use your card at any other netbilling vendor again. They agreed this was terribly wrong in my isolated incident with the one psychotic/proud netbilling vendor I came across. We went through the technical and policy bureacratics for a while almost solving the problem seemingly as the president was in agreement with me that I should not have been globally blacklisted because of the psychotic opinion of one netbilling vendor, but alas in the end they were too lazy to resolve the problem technically, so on many levels my one blacklisted credit card cause my entire name address, IP, or anything to do with me (new credit card or not), to never be usable at any netbilling merchant. I told them that if that is their way of working with customers to try and resolve problems that this is not something I'd accept by coming in as a new merchant. This was about 7 or 8 months ago when this incident happened and I am currently with CCBill as my merchant. No problems with them whatsoever. Responses are much much quicker and the answers have honest-to-good work/thought being put into them when you inquire about the tougher questions. I guess what really urks me about netbilling was when the president agreed with me in principle and told his staff to assist me and in the end his staff stuck me with their easy answer. I took my business elsewhere when I saw how much this in fact differed from their stated customer service stregnths.
We process with netbilling and have referred many other merchants and friends to them without any issues. Thie support and processing are top notch. We also use their call center for inbound order taking and general customer service. I highly recommend them. Mark
So it seems that you had your credit card blocked by a merchant and were pissed off that the Netbilling staff would not unblock it. That is not their duty. Each Netbilling merchant has the ability to use or not use the public negative database and it is each merchants sole choice to do so. Have you actually seen or used Netbilling's system? If you are saying that CCbill is better, you have no idea. Mark
Yeah, I've seen their system and it is ill-equipped compared to ccbill. And yes, I was pissed about being blocked by one vendor, but that was not the heart of my issue since I knew Netbilling had nothing to do with any single vendor's particular blocking rationale. I do not fault Netbilling for the vendor's choice to block me. What I do fault netbilling for is the technical glitches in their system and their inability to address those specific issues. I had a problem that the president of NetBilling said needed to be fixed, but the Netbilling technicians (while I explained things to them) preferred to give short bureacratic responses while failing to understand the real issue while also taking the easy route to stick with their status quo half solution rather than fix a real issue. I don't believe it was NetBilling's place to unblock me from the one single rogue vendor. That is a no-brainer; that one psycho vendor had every right to block me since he chose. The issue is not of the one vendor, but of the shortfalls of the globalized block list. The system is ill-equipped for instances where someone should not be in a global block list, but in a single vendor's block list. I proved this to some higher-ups and this is where NetBilling agreed with me that this was a problem but chose to do nothing about it, even though the president agreed that I had a flawless case as to why I should not be on the global block list, and instead only be on one single vendor's blocklist. Of related note, a different vendor (who was trying to get NetBilling to unblock me, so he could still have my business) could not get my business because of the shortfalls of the global block list. No real vendor does not want to give up the safety of the global block list, but at the same time they don't want to lose customers who've been wrongfully blacklisted by other vendors. Their global block list is ill-equipped to handle wrongful scenarios. Global block lists are intended for hackers, credit card thiefs, chargebacks, etc... but not good customers who got wrongly banned by prejudiced, spiteful, bigot vendors. While the intent of a global block list is generally good for usage by all vendors, there are exceptions to the blanket-block circumstance and NetBilling agreed that their database could not handle the exceptions to that rule. Their system is ill-equipped and they did not work to fix it even after they initially agreed to resolve the problem; that is why I had a beef. I don't care to be unblocked from the one vendor, I just don't think I should've been blocked across the board because one vendor did not like my race. NetBilling initially agreed and then changed their minds by throwing out easy bureacratic answers and pretending like they failed to understand the real problem. -Fred
Good afternoon Marium, No I did not choose www.NetBilling.com My research took me to another vendor: http://www.merchantplus.com I have not made a decision on them. I posted a message for feedback but no one replied. -- Hersh
merchantplus merchantplus is recommended by this very good article I'll look into it also http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/aspnetecommerce/aspnetecommerce.asp#GettingStarted
If you speak to Karen, she will set you up for free. We have sent a bunch of our hosting clients to Netbilling recently and they are all very happy.
We love Netbilling and have used them for years without aMember software. We just got aMember a few days ago, and it was quick and easy to set up with Netbilling. I had only one minor issue, which I expect to be resolved very soon...but it is minor, and probably only effects my setup. Karen in sales is amazing, helpful, friendly. I have also never had anything but positive things to say about their tech support.