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Payment complications: an update

Over the past month or so, I’ve posted several times about issues with FastSpring, our payment processor. See, for example:

The short version is, there were a couple of significant problems on FastSpring’s side, one involving checkouts with more than three items at a time and the other involving Apple Pay. On September 22, I reported that FastSpring claimed to have solved the first one of these. But then, a few days ago, everything went off the rails again.

Problem #1: “Too many items in cart”

I’m sorry to say the “too many items in a cart” problem is back (although it looks a bit different now). A bunch of customers have reported that when they try to check out with four or more items, nothing happens after they click the Check Out button. But this time, the problem is a bit worse, because even after removing all but three items from their cart, some customers still can’t check out. (On the bright side, this latest issue doesn’t affect every customer with more than three cart items, but I don’t yet know why some people can get through the process while others can’t.)

Of course, I immediately reported this problem to FastSpring. I was a bit shocked when, a day later, they told me that yes, they were able to reproduce the problem; yes, it’s definitely an issue on their end; and their Production Support team has logged this issue as high priority. Well, that’s a start. But they haven’t given me any hint as to when the problem might be resolved.

(UPDATE, October 7: Last evening FastSpring sent me an email saying they can no longer reproduce this problem, so they think it has gone away. I asked whether that means they actually fixed something, because it could mean that a butterfly flapped its wings on the other side of the world and an unknowable causal chain of events resulted in the problem randomly, and maybe temporarily, disappearing on its own. Haven’t received a response yet.)

In the meantime, we have a lot of (rightfully) grumpy customers who have gotten stuck in the checkout process. If this happens to you, let me first say I’m very very sorry for the inconvenience, and I’m doing everything I can to address it. My suggestions (while waiting impatiently for FastSpring to fix this at the source) are:

  • Try emptying your cart (click the Empty Cart button), then putting no more than three items in it, and trying to check out again. I can’t guarantee this will work, but it has worked for some people.

  • Send me a note. Tell me as much as you can about your browser and operating system, because you never know what little tidbit of information might provide a useful clue to FastSpring’s engineers.

Problem #2: Apple Pay (again)

However, if you click Check Out and the FastSpring payment interface appears, but you’re still unable to complete your purchase, you are facing a different problem. We’ve had a few reports that a customer can get to the payment screen, but when they click Apple Pay, nothing happens. UGH. All I can suggest, in this case, is to choose a different payment method. I’m very sorry.

Problem #3: Blocked payments

In addition, recently we’ve had a series of incidents where FastSpring blocked someone from making a purchase for entirely inscrutable reasons, and we had to report it to them, wait a day for them to be unblocked, and ask the customer to try again. In this situation, I don’t have any tricks you can try, but absolutely report it to me so I can pester FastSpring on your behalf.

Problem #4: Customers in the Netherlands (NEW on October 6)

I woke up Saturday morning to complaints from three of our customers in the Netherlands saying they tried to make a purchase, but even though they got an error message saying it couldn’t be completed, their banks thought it had. In each case FastSpring merely said there was an “Internal Bank Error.” I have, of course, reported all this too.

What are we doing about all this?

I am so very weary and so frustrated by this seemingly endless string of FastSpring failures. They don’t seem to comprehend that our entire business is dependent on them, yet if they screw up, our customers don’t get mad at them; they get mad at us. More than a few customers have simply given up on buying books from us altogether. These bugs and lost sales have no meaningful impact on FastSpring’s business, but they have a huge impact on ours.

As I reported earlier, I have been working very hard on switching Take Control Books over to a different payment processor called Paddle. I’m getting very close! I still have some testing and tweaks to do, but I think we’ll be ready to give it a try some time next week. (I’m setting things up in such a way that I can flip a switch so that Paddle is processing our payments, but if any serious issues arise, switch back to FastSpring instantly until I’ve sorted them out.) I’ve already updated our privacy policy to reflect the fact that Paddle will be processing some (and, eventually, probably all) of our transactions.

Once again, I apologize for the inconvenience. I’m doing my very best to get a real solution in place as quickly as I can. Thank you for your patience and forbearance.