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Marketplace listing enhancement billed 8 times for the same item

Truelove Infinity

By Truelove Infinity,
in Merchants

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iCade

iCade

Posted
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Truelove Infinity wrote:

If I search for billing I only find older post, last one is from oktober 10? I know of the issues at that time, it was resolved as far as I know.

 

What did you search for to get results for these new issues?

Marketplace listing enhancement

 

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Porky Gorky

Porky Gorky

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This problem has been going on too long now and Linden Lab have seemingly done nothing to fix it. Anyone who takes out an enhancement is at risk of LL billing you multiple times. 

So this begs the question, why on earth is the enhancement feature still available for people to use? Why hasn't Linden Lab turned enhancements off until this issue is fixed?

Is it that they do not care that they are billing their customers unnecessarily or is there a technical reason why turning enhancements off is not possible?

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Dartagan Shepherd

Dartagan Shepherd

Posted
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Exactly so.

1) Stated problem initially was that the system wouldn't bill recurring at all.

2) No statements ever released about multiple billing on individual recurring items.

3) Users sometimes cannot see what outstanding active ads exist.

4) Users sometimes cannot cancel ads.

5) Refunds for the "glitch" period didn't seem to cover multiple billing.

6) During and after the refund period people were still getting multiple billed.

7) Multiple billing continues some months later to this date.

Given LL's penchant for internal statistics, if I weren't a New Yorker I might say that their own statistics are flawed and that they have internal accounting on advertising that absolutely will not reconcile. (Books won't balance on advertising), which is the only thing that would prevent them from taking the responsibility upon themselves to refund mistakes as they happen. (It doesn't, no one gets their money without jumping through support hoops or public outcry).

Aside from the fact that in the real world these types of billing practices are not legal, and that mis-trust in virtual finances further contributes to the decline of SL. Aside from the fact that the practice continues and has been given a pass by Rod himself with no rolling heads anywhere to be found and being the naive fluffy person I am, I could maybe-kind-of chalk it up to willful ignorance about stability and trust when dealing with others money.

Except that the "oops"factor has extended beyond the marketplace recently as well.

And except that no matter how you slice and dice it the house always seems to win.

If only someone had told me years ago that Second Life meant a parody of First Life, things might have been different.

 (Edited point #2 to be more specific about unaddressed single ad multiple billing and not mutliple billing over a merchants spread of ads, which are two separate examples of over-billing.)

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  • 2 weeks later...
Darrius Gothly

Darrius Gothly

Posted
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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

[snip] ... being the naive fluffy person I am ... [snip]

Do you have even the slightest idea just how much it hurts to hyper-velocity exhale Pepsi through your nose? Thanks to the above, I can now offer recent and very direct expertise in the subject.

*grin* And it was the best snort I had all day. Thank you!

Now back to the topic at hand:

This is yet another example of LL's willful disregard for their paying customers, yet in this particular case I kind of understand their logic. (Someone shoot me now, k?)

Their basic premise is that the L$ is a worthless game coupon. If their system takes too many phony-baloney tickets from you, well they're worthless anyway so no big deal. The only reason they might TRY to refund anyone is as a magnanimous act of Corporate Generosity and Charity. And since the L$ are worthless, they're not out anything by giving away extras anyway.

Well ... except if you don't pay tier on time, those phony-baloney game coupons suddenly are VERY expensive. But that's a whole different ball of wax (of a different color even).

PS: I'd be happy to act as the guinea pig recipient of massive quantities of L$ should the Lab ever decide that they truly are a worthless game coupon and further elect to start passing them out to whomever whenever whyever ... etc.

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Dartagan Shepherd

Dartagan Shepherd

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Heheh, glad to give your nostrils a good cleaning. I'm tapping on your monitor now with a dirty rag and a hand out for tips to clean it.

You know, after finally getting an acknowledgement from Rod and the commerce team that they're going to address and work on some of the issues, I'm watching paint dry. Being patient until after the holidays on those because it came up about not disrupting sales during the rapid fire holiday season.

I would expect that at least during January that they'd start lighting a fire under the team and get cracking on those. You know, the stuff besides adding categories. Not that categories aren't good and they were certainly asked for.

As a priority though, going to say they would be on the bottom of most companies list, and of the least interest to establishing a better and more professional environment for merchants and customers. I think January is the "show me" month.

You've developed an SL marketplace, how long would it take to fix a bug where users can't edit their ads?

Oh, and I've got another idea for a new book. It's called "I Paid you $90,000 a Yeear for WHAT?!!!"

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Darrius Gothly

Darrius Gothly

Posted
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Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Heheh, glad to give your nostrils a good cleaning. I'm tapping on your monitor now with a dirty rag and a hand out for tips to clean it.

Thank you .. but y'know what? The world smells funny lately. *grin*

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

You've developed an SL marketplace, how long would it take to fix a bug where users can't edit their ads?

I've spent a lot of time thinking on this issue as well. As a result of my recent development activity, I've delved pretty deeply into the integration between SL and external web services (such as PHP and MySQL). The best I can tell, the purpose of the "Charging, cannot edit" status is a "Semaphore" that would prevent updating a record while it is being automatically updated by a background process.

The concept is that when they run the daily "bill for listing enhancements" process, it first goes through and "locks" all the records by setting the Semaphore. Then it runs through them all, updating their status and submitting charges to the various Merchant accounts. At completion, it then makes one more pass and clears all the semaphores.

We know that at some time in their history, the process that charges for listing enhancements went toes up. Somewhere in its path, it failed .. died .. ceased to run. That was something that happened often in the past .. and may still be happening. Since some folks appear to be getting charged multiple times for the same enhancement, I'd say their first-round "Fix" was to just restart the process if it died during operation. If they haven't fixed the REAL problem that causes it to die mid-process then their failsafe restarts it from the top upon failure, folks could be getting many charges for the same ad.

Back to the Semaphore: It's really nothing more than just a single field in the Listing Enhancement records that says "i'm busy, leave me alone!" About 10 seconds and the phpMyAdmin panel would fix all of those flags. But they are probably NOT going to clear them because their charging process is still major borked. Most likely they can't figure out why it keeps failing .. or maybe they haven't tried. Now that it's at least billing people, that's all that matters.

If they did go through and clear all those flags, the very next time the charging process runs it would set them again, croak .. and there you are with stuck semaphores again. Best to not even rock the boat if you can't actually fix the leaks.

What it really boils down to is one of two possibilities. Either the Marketplace Dev Team is so totally incompetent that they haven't a clue how to fix the charging process ... or they've lost everyone that understands Ruby on Rails and the Marketplace's core Spree platform so there's no one in-house capable of fixing it. Whichever option is correct, it's a total embarassment that they either can't find and fix it, or hire someone that can.

There is a very large and active community of Spree users out there capable of understanding all the inner processes of the platform. Granted they may have added some modules that aren't in the basic Spree package, but if someone knows Spree AND knows RoR, there's no reason a few days of consultant time won't fix the problem. heck, for $10K USD, I'd LEARN RoR and Spree and fix it for them. (And I'm the expensive option. LOL)

Basically, the answer is the Marketplace Dev Team has to actually COMMIT to fixing the issues. Either they're bereft of people that can be devoted to the issue (which is management's fault) or they have no inner motivation to fix them (which is again management's fault). Wanna guess who I think is at fault?

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  • 1 year later...
Cyndi Dyrssen

Cyndi Dyrssen

Posted
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I was billed 2o yes TWENTY times for a 899L week listing thats 20,000L I am just sick over it. The only way to get it to stop was to delete my best selling item for Halloween. That was only in one day before I realized what was happening. It kept saying can't edit while listing updates. Well I felt robbed no diference. I submitted a ticket on the 6th of October and realy thought I would at least get a responce. Like Eddie Murphy said if you only have 10 dollars and someone wants half of it thats not funny.

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