I was looking over the bandwidth usage today for all our sites and I noticed that on average 1 out of 20 customers has never uploaded nor logged into there CP at all EVER! What I am wondering is if this is normal or if I should call our third party CC company and ask them to check it out.. When we get an order someone trys to verify the IP they signed up with and/or do a WHOIS if the domain is allready registered and so on just to keep the fraud amounts down and all these people have checked OK on all verification. Just wondering if this is just me.. I mean have only been with us 1 month and some are like 6 month old accounts though.

As an examples I have 3 that have not uploaded, nor used anything (Anything at all) in 4 months.

And they pay 24.95 a month =)

Yeah, I have some of these people also. It does seem a bit strange. I might have our CC processor check these orders out also.


I can't understand why people would pay for something and never use it.

OKI,

Not really a big deal. I remember my first website took months to get off the ground. I subscribed to a local company for space then just left it sit for months because I'd run out of time to build the site :)

Now, if it was extremely high-bandwidth site with only one short ftp session ever I'd take a look...

Cheers,

Originally posted by rochen
I can't understand why people would pay for something and never use it.

Well, I've been renting a safe deposit box for over a year now and have never put anything in it. :o

Not that uncommon, no.

I have more than a few sites that have literally 0 bytes transferred, the only traffic is the day I set them up and I hit the placeholder to make sure it all went through OK.

I also have people who pay for accounts and never use them, one found out that easyspace would charge to move her domain 2 us so she never bothered !

I have a client that bought seven different accounts nearly two years ago and has never done a thing with them. I contacted the owner and asked him why he continued to pay for the accounts if he wasnt going to utilize them...

He replied that he just wanted to make sure no one got the domain names as he was eventually going to do something with them.

I explained he could just register the names and not worry about paying for the hosting until he was ready to put something up.

He said he wanted to put something on the sites but doesn't know how to build websites...

I now have a $7,000.00 contract to design and build 2 fairly simple sites and the option to developed the remaining 5 in Oct.

He said he decided to go with us for the design because I was nice enough to explain that he need not pay for the hosting just to keep the dom. names, even though I knew that we would be loosing the monthly premiums on these accounts if he went that rout.

I just contacted 6 more of our silent clients... and have landed the design contract on one, and a template install on another.

Of the remaining 4
one did not respond
2 went to just dom reg.
and one decided to keep things as they are.

For the most part I found that they apreciate the fact that we are concerned for their welfare and it builds a stronger relationship with our clients.

Mj.

Originally posted by OKIHost
I was looking over the bandwidth usage today for all our sites and I noticed that on average 1 out of 20 customers has never uploaded nor logged into there CP at all EVER! What I am wondering is if this is normal or if I should call our third party CC company and ask them to check it out.. When we get an order someone trys to verify the IP they signed up with and/or do a WHOIS if the domain is allready registered and so on just to keep the fraud amounts down and all these people have checked OK on all verification. Just wondering if this is just me.. I mean have only been with us 1 month and some are like 6 month old accounts though.

Just a note, some people set their web browser up to use a proxy
server so verifying the IP address that they signed up from may
not always be the best way to verify a new account. Voice
verification is usually best. This cuts down on fraud (in my experience) 99%.

Silent customers are the best customers.

Sometimes people can't make the time ...

Like me for instance, I have 3 dialup accounts for some computers in my home which I haven't used the service for some 4 odd months now because i've upgraded to broadband .. never had the time to cancel them so I just pay them :(

Which reminds me, why am I posting here, I should be on the phone with my ISP :)

Originally posted by bofh
Voice verification is usually best. This cuts down on fraud (in my experience) 99%.

I agree. We had a dodgee looking order a few weeks back and all checked out. The IP, email address, domain name, everything. But something didn't feel quite right about the order, so I contacted our payment processor to telephone the card owner to check it all out. Would you believe it, it was a fraud order. So I simply refunded the amount to the owners card and that was the end of it. If it hadn't been for that call we would have most likely been landed with a charge back fine.

Voice is definitely the best way to verify orders.

... and good to have these types of clients :)

We have many clients who signed and never uploaded anything more then single index page.

One of our client sites are not even pointing to our server, when we informed him and asked if he need any help from us to transfer them... he refused "No thanks, I will take care" And he never transferred them. His payments are intact. :confused:

Another one left is account unused for almost a year ($99/month). Then he suddenly started using it and added more then 50 domains in his account in less then 2 months. And recently bought his own dedicated server with us. I believe this client was sure that he will start his own reselling very soon but took him almost a year.

It does happen. We even have one who's never even pointed his domain to our servers. The account is sitting there, unused, with not even a placeholder on it. Yet the account is still paid like clockwork every month.

At first it does mess with your head. Coming from a webdesign background I used to worry about customers that didn't contact us as webdesign is all about chatter to get the job done. Once I got over that, it was customers who didn't use their accounts. I'm pretty much over that now. :)

Greg Moore

We have one customer that signed up with us, but instead of pointing the DNS to our servers he pointed it to another hosting company. It looks like he signed up for two services at once for some odd reason. He’s still paying the hosting fee and isn’t using anything. It’s really strange. I guess if he doesn’t cancel the account, I’ll just keep the recurring billing running (maybe I'll contact him to see what's going on)… Like some of you said, silent customers are indeed the best.

Originally posted by bofh
Voice verification is usually best. This cuts down on fraud (in my experience) 99%.
I may be moving to an alternate method of accepting credit cards in the future, but at the moment I am only using PayPal. Do I personally have to worry about CC fraud when using PayPal, or will PayPal be the one to handle any problems that arise in this area? What about services like 2checkout.com?

credit card fraud should be a concern, no matter what processor you use. PayPal is a facility to transfer money, rather than a merchant prcessor as such. paysystems and 2checkout will probably provide better fraud protection, as will full merchant systems like authorize.net

However the best line of defense if always your own company. No-one will be as concerns about bad orders as much as you, and a close eye on who's going through will work to your advantage.

Greg Moore

We found that many people got caught up in the .com hype and did not want their biz name to be taken so they bought domains through us that included hosting