Payment Destination

[RiverNet]

I have a user who shows up on my hotspot as paid access and has been able to download data, however the payment destination is to Worldspot, not my paypal account. There was no email from paypal notifying me of the payment. The payment shows in billing history. The payment doesnot show up in my paypal account.
My hotspot name is RiverNet, could you check this out and advise. Please let me know if you require any further information.

[WorldSpot]

Hi

This is how the paypal revenue sharing works.
Payment destination alternates between you and worldspot, and you always have more that 75%.
If you don't want to share paypal revenue, you need to subscribe.

Best regards

[RiverNet]

Thank you for the prompt reply.
ther are a couple of things regarding the payment method that I would like to comment on. But firstly let me just say for the record that I am happy with the revenue share agreement. You have provided a service and I am happy to pay for that. I am also happy with the calculation of your share.
It is just that I would have expected that EACH payment would be shared. I can understand that your payment system of alternating the payment destination may have been set up to reduce transaction cost from paypal, but there are three problems with this method.
1. There is no notification (from paypal) when a new customer subscibes and pays for the service.
2. The TICKET list does not show the ticket. (the only place it shows up is in the billing history)
3. My paypal summary will not show the total value of my revenue.

Of these items two are easily fixed.
1. It would be a (in my opinion) simple process for worldspot to send an email to me with the transaction details, in place of the paypal notification when a subscriber pays for the service.
2. It is my belief that ALL valid ticket should show up in the ticket list - (This  i believe is an oversight / bug and requires a modification to your service).
3. My preference (as long as it does not cost more in paypal fees) would be that all payments be credited to my paypal account and the sharing be done via paypal forwarding your share to you in line with the sharing ability of paypal. This if possible (and or practicable) would solve items 1, 2 & 3 in one go, as paypal would send the notification, the ticket would show up in the Ticket list, my paypal summary would reflex total revenue and expenses and worldspot would still get the share that it is entitled to.

If solution three is not a workable solution I would still ask that you give consideration to the solutions presented for items 1 & 2.

Once again thank you for the prompt reply, these comments are intended to help improve on an already excellent service, not to critisize the good work that you have already done.

[WorldSpot]

Hi

All generated tickets should appear in your ticket list (they should be gathered in a ticket bundle with the same name as the profile name).
But when your user has registered before paying, no ticket is generated, it is included in the user account. This way, the user logs back with his own password, not a generated one.

About your fix proposals:
1: This is possible. Do you want an email only when the payment destination is worldspot, or for every payment?
2: This is also possible and it will be done.
3: This is not possible. The alternating destination method was designed for you to get money first. Paypal does not offer a sharing mechanism. The solution I choosed not to use (and that all competitors have) was that worldspot would get all the payments, and you would be paid every month when there is enough money for a payment.

[RiverNet]

Regarding these items
1. My preference would be an email for every payment. This covers the issue of getting at least one notification for each payment recieved.
If i could be a bit cheeky and ask that the emails be in a format that allows easy extraction of the data so I can run a script to generate a transaction file for my accounting package.
Other users may have different views, I will accept what you and / or the majority rule.

2. Thankyou, I believe this is a clearer way to show users.

3. Thanks for the explanation, Your method is better than the available alternatives.

[WorldSpot]

Maybe another alternative...
If you need to process the payments. Why wouldn't you copy paste the online billing history into excel then process it?
Isn't an email script more complicated?

[RiverNet]

email processing CAN be more difficult than the method you suggest.
But it depends on how the data is presented and what you want to do with the data once you have it.

My preference is to avoid manual steps when possible & the current screen does not allow for date range selection - although this can be achieved by multiple cut and pastes across several pages. Also programming excel can be a career all on its own, so I would then save the file as csv and process the resultant file with a scripts anyway.

So really what i am asking is for a way to get a csv file of my transactions.

If the data in the email is in  ascii or even html and tagged for easy access then it can be extracted with sed / regex or almost any of the html parser programs out there. This would then become an almost fully automated process.

But for me an ideal solution would be for you to add a download button similar to the ticket list screen allowing users to download details of all transactions between a "user specified" date range -
it only needs to be in csv format but ideally include all details of each transactions. This will allow users to process the transactions in any way they see fit.

I realise that any changes / additions to your code take time and effort, and it might be that amount of effort required to achieve this or any other change is not justified.

So I will accept the notifications in what ever form that you decide best suites worldspot and the majority of users.

[WorldSpot]

I'll see if I can add csv download for paypal history.
This seems a better solution.
But I can't tell you when this will be done...