Having started the 'When good goes bad' thread, and having finally spoken to Kristin, this is my latest take on things.

Right now, they're stretched. They're making a change of their merchant provider, and for which there's presumably a good reason, and also their taking on extra staff at the moment is impacting support. Kristin and Tellie are helpful, but it sounds like they're being pulled in many different ways, and juggling the things that they need to get done, with the needs of support and the rest. I can understand this as I'm in the same boat in trying to tackle multiple aspects of my business, although I don't let support suffer and give that the highest priority as I believe it's paramount.

So on the one hand I am sympathetic because I can appreciate what they're going through, but on the other hand I would handle things very differently if I was in their shoes.

IME, keeping in touch with customers and responding to even the little queries such as "where's my $15" would buy them lots in terms of good faith - and more time to fix the problem. There was a post today in their forums from a customer pleading for an email from them, just to acknowledge that someone will look at their problem. Until this really hits home with 2c, then nice though the folks that I've emailed with are, I fear that they're fighting a losing battle with customers. It really pains me to see it, but that's how it is. If responsiveness picked up it would do wonders, and much more than even offering 1% comission and beating everyone else.

Certainly some customer queries, may be even many, are from a lack of understanding of the 2checkout system. People don't read FAQ's, and get in a flap about things. But that should signal the fact that the website isn't answering peoples queries efficiently; basically that it's inadequate.

The way I approach things is not only to answer a support query, but to ask myself why the question was asked in the first place. If someone asks how much my product costs, and despite it being clearly on the site in a number of places people sometimes do, maybe my site is deficient. How could my site have prevented me from ever having to deal with the support question in the first place, and still leave the customer happy? That's what I wonder, and it's surely part of the constant improvement process that any site should be undergoing.

For 2c, a clear link not just with explanation subjects like "How our system works", but questions like "Where's my money?" in the FAQ, and even on account statements, may help to stop some support queries if it explains things well. i.e. think from the customers perspective, and not just the sites perspective. Active links for more aspects of the online statement, such as the reserve columns to explain what they are might also help. Links for more of the figures might help to. People think and look for information and answers in different ways, and questions are raised by the customer at different points on the site. When they're looking at their statements is one. "This doesn't look right, I wonder why?". The more ways that a customer can find the answer they want via the web, the fewer support support queries there'll be.

But this is just IMHO of course. Maybe I'm wrong.

Extra staff, about time :)

man, when will they learn.

They dont need more support staff they need more people to fix their system.

Why do you think 2CO gets so many support issues? There system is a piece of s**t and always messing things up.

If they fixed all glitches/bugs and made the admin area more userfriendly i guarantee their support questions would halve!!!

God 2CO makes me soooo mad :-(

Exactly :) I've been reporting issues on and off ever since I joined. Even the things that they agreed about and said they'd fix they never did. That's what frustrates me too. I signed up, handling all real-time order processing on my side and their system is adequate; barely. But I had to jump through hoops to get any kind of decent integration into my site. I push their features to the limit, but that isn't difficult.

I struggle with the fact that on the one hand I like one or two of the people who work there because they have been attentive most of the time, and on the other they're not demonstrating any innovation and moving forward. As a result, they're actually falling behind.

Things that bug me include:

* Their scripts have bugs in the parsing of URL's, e.g. when cloaking return scripts with their Wget requests, they don't parse, or actually recognise, https urls properly, and what's that, a 10 second change to perl regexp to fix. As a result they transform URL's into an invalid localised url. So if a return script outputs HTML with a link to an https page, because my entire user area is on a secure server, the page is corrupted. Instead I have to have links to a non secure script that then knows to do a redirect back to the secure server. That is just so messed up I still can't believe it. And what's worse, they don't seem to even understand that a problem exists. I'm forced to wonder whether the perl scripts they have came with their own merchant account and that they don't have the necessary skills to fix them.

* The 2001 starting date for credit card expiry makes the site look unmaintained (which it is of course but they don't need to be telling all my customers that, particularly as my integration makes it look it's my site that has the crappy interface).

* They require javascript for the validation of card fields. I actually output an appology on my payment screen if people hit it without javascript. saying that 2checkout had agreed to work to put validation into their perl scripts if javascript was disabled. But have they. No, of course not.

* The site is hard to navigate, and some bits you can't reach from the members area.

* When there are server problems, people can get default apache error pages. A custom 2checkout page would be better, and of course no error even better still

* Demo mode is now broken, but you can get around it. The lunacy here is that they now actually expose the fact that a demo mode exists. At least before, if a transation wasn't a demo transaction then the existance of such a thing wasn't plain to see. Now they redirect requests to a routine with a GET request that has 'demo=' in it. Thanks a bunch folks. Now it's clear to anyone who looks about how they can force a demo transaction to go through. Ok, so my system will handle that and reject it as invalid if it's not supposed to be a demo transaction, but I thought that their change was supposed to make demo mode secure and instead they screwed it up and made it more insecure. It's so ironic.

Then there are missing features, like multiple header/footers...

I can't understand why there's no innovation. The system isn't that good, but it could be excellent. Maybe there's a lack of vision and creativity in their team to pull it off. Who knows. But it's a real shame though.

I agree with all of you. I've been considering 2checkout but it just lacks some important features, like the ability to edit recurring orders, better customization of the order form, etc. It just seems that they spend no more time to improve their system. They even use Kayako for their ticket system which is sophisticated, but I think if they can improve their system, they would receive much fewer support tickets.

I would be happy if they didn't add any new features so long as they fixed there current ones.

Doing this there support tickets would drop and then after time they would have time for the new features.