Archive for the ‘Hall of Shame’ Category
We are currently recommending that clients refrain from maintaining an account with ePassporte.com (which is a prepaid Visa card scheme). Our experience has been that they have an unbelievably poor level of customer service and unnecessarily high fees.
It’s bad enough that simple service requests can easily take a week or more to get resolved; just try to get resolution on fraudulent charges. They also appear to have a large number of service reps who do not speak the King’s English, which only compounds the problem.
Since ePassporte is owned by a non-U.S. company, some shopping web sites will not accept it, their physical presence in the Los Angeles area notwithstanding.
Lastly, ePassporte’s monthly “statements” do not adhere to normal accounting standards. For example, the same charge may appear on two different months’ statements, and the ending balance for one month doesn’t always equal the starting balance of the next.
For these and other reasons we are warning clients to avoid this vendor if at all possible.
Effective 10/31/08, we are terminating all support for PayPal.com. We will no longer recommend the use of PayPal to our clients.
Our experience has been that PayPal’s appallingly poor support, lack of reasonable processes for dispute resolution, and failure to follow banking and wire transfer laws make it an unacceptable choice for us and our clients.
We are currently suggesting AlertPay.com and MoneyBookers.com for money transfers without a merchant account. Clients with sufficient transaction volume may wish to consider Charge.com, which offers merchant accounts with NO setup or application charges.
In the interest of full disclosure, we still maintain a PayPal account because, in reality, one cannot do business on eBay without one. However we only use it when there is no alternative.
Clients are strongly urged to refrain from using ANY service or paying ANY invoices from Domain Registry of America.
This company sends out advertisements for domain services which are designed to look like invoices. Unless you read every single word of the mailing, you could easily be fooled into paying the fake invoice, which also causes your domain to be transferred to their control. This is all despite a court decision forbidding them from engaging in deceptive practices.
The only way to make them stop once and for all is to starve them; refuse to take the bait!
Clients are advised not to buy or install Microsoft Vista, nor buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed. Our personal experience is that Vista is buggy, difficult to work with, and incompatible with a wide assortment of existing hardware and software (including older versions of Microsoft’s own software, e.g., Outlook 2000 and Money).
The only way issues like this get fixed is when people vote with their feet and their wallets. So cast your vote by refusing to accept this train wreck of an operating system.
UPDATE:
Dell is now offering a choice between Vista and XP on customized PCs. They’ve gotten the message even if Microsoft hasn’t.
UPDATE 2:
Dell is now offering XP on a scant few machines, coexisting with Vista. Sadly, it appears that Vista is inevitable, barring a change to a completely different OS (e.g., to Linux or Mac). Clients are advised to consider upgrading their existing XP machines’ hardware to delay the necessity of purchasing a machine with Vista preinstalled. Perhaps with enough time and Service Packs, most of the kinks will be resolved.
UPDATE 3:
Microsoft is now selling Windows 7, the successor to Vista. Word is that it looks very much like Vista, but with many of the annoyances and performance issues corrected. One wonders why this isn’t a service pack instead of a whole new version. It takes a lot of brass to charge customers for fixing things that shouldn’t have been broken in the first place. Granted there are some new features, but many of them are so esoteric that the average user won’t care one whit about them. Clients are advised to wait several months after release before upgrading, to allow some of the kinks to be worked out.
UPDATE 4:
We have been using Windows 7 for about two weeks now (as of this writing on 3/5/10). There has not be a single glitch, crash, or hiccup. It’s astonishing. OK there were a few incompatibilities. For example our Brother AIO printer no longer scans across the network. JFax software no longer works; however there is a reader that can open JFax attachments. There’s some adjustment, due to lots of things being in different places. But, all in all, it’s been a good experience.
However, we are still reluctant to recommend Windows 7 to clients. If you can, it would be wise to wait until the first Service Pack is released. But if your computer dies and you need a new one, Windows 7 is a reasonable and acceptable option.
Effective immediately (March 2, 2007), we are curtailing support for Google AdWords. We have come to the realization that Google’s arrogance, poor service, opaque processes, and relatively high costs are not in the best interest of our clients.
Existing AdWords clients will be supported through June 1, although we will be encouraging them to migrate to other programs, such as Miva or 7Search.
