FastSpring are dropping their orders(at)fastspring email and moving to a dedicated support portal questioncharge.com.
I was wondering is this professional, as according to Lean B2B one shouldn’t change the way people and businesses usually do things.
What do you guys think?
I think it’s a bad move from a customer service standpoint:
I didn’t hear about this, even though I use FastSpring for one of my products.
How did you hear about this? I’d like to learn more.
Excerpt from the email I’ve received:
We are happy to share that we are on schedule to launch the new Consumer Support Portal. As mentioned in the previous email, this new process allows us to manage a higher threshold of support cases while reducing the time it takes to resolve each case.
This is a friendly reminder that on January 6th, 2020 we are longer using the email alias, orders@fastspring.com. It is important that you update all of your buyer-facing documentation (e.g. websites, emails, receipts) and replace orders@fastspring.com with[ questionacharge.com] by January 6th, 2020.
What this means:
Update Your Documentation
Change Management Process
another annoying thing they did was to decouple the “dashboard” and merchant support. Now you need to login separately to access the support incidents.
This is very unprofessional of them. The user pays with a FastSpring.com domain (which is shown on their receipt), and then sees a QuestionACharge.com domain when looking for support? Makes it look like malware has hijacked their support request. Changing a business name relationship like that isn’t a good look. If I buy from FastSpring.com, I expect only to deal with FastSpring.com.
It’s like paying with PayPal.com and then getting directed to QuestionThisPayment.com for a dispute - I wouldn’t trust it at all and would be calling PayPal by phone instead to sort out my issue. You shouldn’t be confusing your customers like this, IMO. FastSpring may end up generating more support requests for themselves in the long run.
Customers are very self-centered, so I can see the logic of putting an attention-grabbing reference to questionacharge[.]com portal in invoice.
The short domain name is based on keywords related to a frequent support request: tax refund. Probably this is going to work as intended.
Before that change, customers often contacted the suppliers and they had to relay those requests to FastSpring and back.
I use FastSpring and like it less and less. It used to be very good several years ago, but not now.
There are lots of failed payments for no real reason. Payments are failing for people who’ve been paying us every month for 3-4 years and now they see “Payment failed” message with no details, and in the control panel they show “Risk analysis” - wtf, a customer made 50+ payments in the past and now it’s all of a sudden “risky”?
I think something’s seriously wrong with them. And things are not improving. Their commission is 8.9% and this is not worth it. My rant is over 
@Dmitry probably you remember how FastSpring emerged at times when DigitalRiver consolidated all major payment providers and Plimus after its acquisition moved to a direction at which FastSpring is now headed.
The question is where shall an mISV move now ?
Paddle is a good alternative to FastSpring.
Paddle looks pretty good. I don’t see much information available for switching recurring payment providers It seems that the providers have an incentive to import subscriptions, but due to the security and negative incentive to export, I would anticipate it would require convincing the existing subscribers to manually re-subscribe with a new provider.
…anyone with experience here done this before? How was your experience?
Back then I’ve been using Plimus, but they degraded over time so I had to move out of them. At this moment, I have good experience with Avangate (now called 2Checkout) so if you’re looking for a payment processor, I can advice them.
I also analyzed payment problems with FastSpring, and it seems that majority of failed payments (when some of my long term customers suddenly were unable to pay) happen for customers from Colombia, Brazil, Chile and other Spanish-speaking countries. If they are not your target market, probably FastSpring will be good too.
I have good experiences with Avangate as well. I’m not using recurring payments so can’t tell how it works in that area, but for one off sales it’s good, handles taxes world wide, works without much issues, has decent support…
I have been using Fastspring for several years.In the beginning they had the best in class support for sellers( when Ken White was around),which was the primary reason why i started using them.
Over time their support experience had started to deteriorate … it seems now its the worst.
They take too long to respond to tickets;Using a different domain to improve experience… Really??-- > what exactly is the point ?? Why are they pushing half baked stuff to customers?
I have also noted that the emails they sent out is not properly formatted … looks like they don’t preview their email campaigns.Reported this,no action was taken… They are in the path to the next Digital River
I’m planning to migrate to 2checkout(Avangate) … they now have better support system and looks professional.
Take a look at their mail … has anyone noticed this?
After dropping the orders@fastspring.com email and directing customers to use the https://questionacharge.com support site, it appears that there is no longer a working Contact method on that site (unless I’m overlooking it). There are some links labeled, “Contact” or “Consumer Support”, but all of them lead to static information pages now (there used to be a form where a customer could ask a question).
I see that Paddle has a chat bot which leads to an email form where customers can submit a question. Anyone here using Paddle and can give any feedback on how that works out for their customers?
Have you moved to 2Checkout. How is their support? (I have currently a support case waiting already two days in the FS Seller support queue, which is ridiculous)
We’ve been using Authorize.Net for decades and never had a problem. And you get better rates than these “easier” payment solutions.
