My Path to a Working Site, and How to Not Handle Customer Service.

234 followers

3 years ago

Customer service means different things to different people and when done right a business can earn a customer, or better yet, a fan, for life. Yet, when done poorly, years worth of good service, goodwill, and positive experiences can be tossed out like yesterday's trash.

A few months ago I decided that I wanted to build a network of sports-related websites. I've been in and around the publishing industry for the better part of my life, including being a sports editor of a weekly, the ad manager of another weekly, editor/publisher of yet another weekly, senior editor of a basketball website, and have spent 20 years doing custom development for publishing automation projects. That being said, I simply miss the thrill of the process, so if I'm going to try to make a few extra bucks on the side with an Internet Marketing project, the first of those projects is going to be a sports-related site that I can enjoy for the shear love of publishing and the love for sports. So, with that backstory out of the way, I'll share my experience of building out a website, since that's the initial training challenge here at WA, and then we'll run up to what has to be one of the worse experiences and a how-to for how-to not handle your customers...

The first challenge that I faced was getting the site up and running and figuring out how to get it to self-populate. With everything I've got going on and knowing that no one is going to pay me to sit and write up basketball games like they used to, I needed technology to come to my rescue. Over the last few years I've tried to find a way to do this. I've looked at themes I like, I've played with various WordPress plug-ins that would help, etc., but nothing looked like it was going to make it come together smoothly. Then, a couple of months ago I got an email about a system that someone had put together that seemed like it might be a good start to my solution.

As I built out my first site, a basketball site, I started to realize that, in fact, this was going to be something I could sink my teeth into. Content was being imported, the pages looked pretty good and the key, the theme I was using had a lot of built-in spaces for advertising (you knew I'd get around to the money stuff at some point, right?). The thing was, I didn't want to have to put ads into an ad manager within WordPress, then have to do it again when I built out the second, or third, or xxxth site. I needed software to run an ad network, even if it was my own. Now, here's the thing, I used to run an affiliate network and a banner network, and back when the porn industry started running pop-ups and pop-unders, a friend of mine that was into selling traffic on porn sites asked me to write some code for him to manage those pop-unders and pop-ups, so I did. Yes, much of your frustration with pop-ups and pop-unders back then was possibly due to me and my buddy Mike (I apologize, but it was a living...). During that process, I created a tracking system for the pop-unders and a way to manage everyone's ads and clicks and impressions, etc., so, I have a huge library of programs and self-written code to do what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, it's all old and outdated and who knows how long it would take me to update to the latest versions of the systems needed to run the code. (I know, land the plane LaMonte, where's this going...). Anyway, I started looking for an ad management system that was easy to use, could handle working how I wanted to work, and wasn't modified for the last time 10 years ago. I found three programs, tested them, threw one out because the code was encoded, meaning I couldn't play around under the hood if I wanted to; threw another one out when I realized that it was just too simple and wouldn't be expandable; and the third I couldn't get to run, now matter what I did and the help I got from the publisher. As an old baseball guy, the three strikes and you're out rule doesn't always have to apply, sometimes we can dip into the days of when our kids were just learning and we'd toss them an extra strike because the last one they missed was my fault for not throwing it where their bat was. I decided to up my game and look into more expensive options.

Enter Code Canyon. I haven't spent much time on Code Canyon, but there's a lot of really great stuff there. In fact, a lot of the newer software being sold in the Internet Marketing world is white labeled stuff bought on Code Canyon (yes, I'm considering it...). I demoed a couple of programs, played around with their admin sides and settled on one. I will say that I didn't look as closely as I should have, but that's on me, I can't blame anyone for my haste in wanting to get to the next step on my journey to getting this site up and running. So, I plunked down $99 and downloaded my newly found ad manager system. Technology like this is what excites me, especially trying to figure out how far I can take it. So, I jumped in and started the installer. Right away I ran into a road block, my server was using an older subversion of PHP 7 than I needed, so I had to update that. Then I was missing a few PHP extensions and one of the wouldn't load. That took some time, but I muddled through it and finally got it working. Then, well, you get the idea, it wasn't a simple process and three days later I saw the login page for the first time. I did a sharp fist pump, scared both of my dogs out of deep dreams of chasing squirrels up the trees in the back yard and had to take a break because, well, now they actually wanted to go out and chase the squirrels out of the yard...

When we returned, I dug into the admin area. There are a lot of options, it all was very elegantly packaged up, so I was happy with it. The first thing I wanted to do was drop in an add, drop that code on a demo page and see an ad appear. I didn't think that was too much to ask after chasing this thing down for a month, I was wrong. It took me awhile to realize that the admin area does not allow for adding publishers or advertisements, I had to create accounts for my publication, then the advertiser, then do what I needed to do with each. So, I did. Then I got to add some ads. I was thrilled to see ads in the system, so much so that I grabbed ads for two products and set up 18 ads, three each of three sizes. It was awesome, I had that, "I've conquered this challenge and now I can load up the affiliate offers and retire next year on all the bazillions of dollars I'm going to make." (come on, you've all said it, admit it!) That was until I wanted to edit one of the ads, so I clicked it, noticed that ad 3 was labeled as ad 1 (a red flag for anyone that's ever done any database work...) and then realized that what I had done affected ad 1. I must have done something wrong, I tried ad 2, it also said ad 1, I did an edit, ad 1 was edited. Ugh. OK, so I'll delete ad 2 and put it back in, that'll solve it, that always solves it. Wait, where did all my ads go? Yup, all 18 were deleted.

My two Golden Retrievers love it when dad has software trouble, it means that they get to go outside more often and for longer periods of time. As we wandered around the yard, our newest Golden, Bailey, whom we recently adopted, is loving the the fact that shes gets to run like a crazy dog, after spending the first year of her life living in a small apartment with no yard. On this day, our 10-yr old Golden, Sandi, and I got to see what Bailey is capable of when she turns on the jets and just lets herself run. I've never seen anything like it before.

Back at the box, I tried the ad test again, this time I was more careful, I watched what I was doing, I only added three ads, and I carefully named them so I knew that there was no conflict. This time, I decided to tempt my fate and I took the next step and added my ads to my site, what could possibly go wrong? Surprisingly, I saw ads, really, I saw ads where they were supposed to be. OK, in full disclosure, I saw one ad, the same ad, not all three, but one. I refreshed a few times, same ad, eventually the ads were replaced with place holders, which I thought was odd, but that's another challenge for another day, I need to see what's up with the back-end of the ad system. I went to edit, it was wrong, I deleted one, it deleted everything. OK, time for some TV...

I emailed the company's support line, told them what was going on and they asked for log in details to see if they could fix it. They came back saying my database was out of date. Good grief, this could be a nightmare, I have dozens of applications running on my server with database access, what's going to get broken if I update. The dogs are loving me right about now, because I needed some air before I decided to do a major update of the database that was holding everything together. There will be tennis balls flying in the back yard due to this one (dog owners know what I'm talking about, you cat people can continue to look confused...).

Fortunately, the database update wasn't an issue and now I'm running a shiny new(er) version, which should be awesome (translated - I haven't seen any differences, but hey, my current batch of problems are solved, so who cares!). I do a new test, my ads now labeled 1, 2, and 3, actually edit ad 1 when asked to, or ad 2 when clicked on, and when I delete ad 3, the other two just look sad that their brother ad 3 has been canceled. This is good and now that I have ads in the system, let's see if we can see them on the page again, since that one thing did work before. Sure enough, I was getting those same place holders I had before instead of blank space, so I knew that they were connected, just not right. At this point I assumed that the old data from the old database could have corrupted some of the setting in the database, so i decided to use the sledgehammer approach and just deleted the directory, wipe out the database tables, and start from scratch. But first, I took the dogs out for some more zoomies (I've never seen a dog put on so many miles in such a short period of time.).

After reinstalling everything, I loaded up my publisher info in the publisher area, added my advertiser information, added my admin information, set up the ad sizes I wanted to start with, then loaded up three ads, then six, then 12 more. So far, so good. I went back into my WordPress set up and added the updated publisher code to the network to see if the ads would run and hit refresh so I could bask in my glory of accomplishment. Only to see those damn placeholder ads again. What had I done wrong? The ads worked before, I checked settings and I checked keywords, and I checked the geo targeting settings. Everything looked right. So, at that point, back to support. I told them what was going on and they said they'd get back to me. Then next day, they asked me if I had checked my geo targeting account to see if I had credits available. Nope, I hadn't thought about that. I had set up an account, but since I was just testing I didn't think anything of it. Sure enough, the free account allows for 100 credits, each ad shown equals one credit. My home page has seven ads on it, so every refresh wiped off seven credits. Back when things were working and then the ads switched to the placeholders, it happened because I had run through my 100 credits. Ok, we'll I don't need geo targeting, I'll just turn that off. Nope, no option to turn it off (I asked support, they said it can't be turned off). OK, my next option, I buy a monthly plan for credits. For $9.99 I can get 50,000 credits, remembering I have seven ads on my home page and each individual story page has three or four ads, you can see how quickly I'll blow through 50,000 credits. Here's the quick math, over a 30 day period and figuring for seven credits on the home page, it works out to just under 240 visits to the home page per day before the credits are used up. That's fine for a few months while ramping up traffic, but sooner than later that won't be enough, so I would have to buy the next plan, 500,000 credits for $49.99. It's not unreasonable, but it's unnecessary as I don't need to geo target my ads. So, I go back to the company and ask again, can I turn that off, otherwise the software is useless to me. They simply say, no. I say then I'd like a refund because I'm not going to use a program that is forcing me to subscribe to a service I don't need to be able to use it and at the moment, it won't serve ads. They say, contact Envato, they administer the licenses. I say, but it's your software, I'd like a refund from you. They again, say, in the exact same few words, to contact Envato. OK, so I contact Envato, tell them the story, they say, they reviewed the situation and are denying my request for a refund because the software works. I respond with, but I can't use it without subscribing to a service I wasn't told I needed before purchasing the software. They say, they can't give me a refund, but they'll give me a courtesy credit and are taking my license away. I tell them that it's unacceptable, if they are not giving me a refund, then I want the license because as some point they'll realize that they need to put the option of turning off geotargeting back in (it's shown as an extension that can be turned off in their documentation, so they've removed that functionality at some point) and at that point I'll possibly use it again. They say they can't do that because their courtesy credit gets put in as a refund, which means the license gets invalidated.

So in a nutshell, the software company sells me software that needs a subscription to a function I don't need, without telling me I needed it before buying the software. I realize after downloading and installing that this is the case, then ask for a refund. They say that since it's a download, they can't refund me and to ask Envato, who also says they can't refund me, but as a courtesy to make me happy, they'll give me a 'store credit' for the purchase price and are revoking my license. In other words, no one is willing to accept the fact that they are selling software without telling the clients the entire story, $9,99 might not be a big deal to most, $49,99 might not be either, but it's the princple of the matter that has me upset. I buy something that I can't use, I would like a refund. I've acknowledged that the software seems good and they were good about getting it running for me, but I can't use it and they failed to tell me about the subscription before I bought it. Am I wrong here?

So, at this point I'm trying to get Envato to reinstate my license purely out of principle and considering how it's all been handled (with the company hiding behind the 'Envato handles our licenses' line), I'm not backing down. In full disclosure, I went into the code, found the five lines needed to be commented out to disable the geotargeting function, and got it working as needed. In my mind, I own the software since they aren't refunding my money, so I'm using it. I didn't accept Envato's hush money, so I've paid for it and with the purchase I have full source code rights to make changes as I see fit.

It's a prime example of how not to handle customer service. If your policy is no refunds, stick to your no refunds policy and tell you customer that, dont' pass the buck to the other guy and dismiss the situation as not your problem. Also, if you're selling something that requires additional purchases, you best tell your client that upfront and not be surprised that they have an issue with having to put down more just to use your product. Both companies have lost me as a customer and while I'm just one guy, if this is how they handle things, I'm sure I won't be the last (based on reviews, I wasn't the first either).

On a positive note, my site is coming along nicely, please have a look and give me your opinion:

https://www.vcphoops.com/