Author Topic: Amazon Pay has decided to block donationcoder payments (Read 25642 times)

mouser · « **on:** March 04, 2020, 08:51 AM »

Amazon Pay, which we allow people to use to buy commercial licenses for our software from our commercial license page, has decided to block us and refuse to process payments to us.
They have said it is related to us looking like a charity, but won't elaborate or tell us what we could do to fix the problem.
So it goes.

mouser · « **Reply #1 on:** March 04, 2020, 10:12 AM »

I actually do most of my purchasing from amazon.com, and consider myself a big fan.

But here's a reminder of what the world looks like if you are an individual trying to deal with (or are dependent on) a large corporation:

After amazon pay decided yesterday without warning to block payments to us, they have a form you can use to submit an appeal. I explained why I thought they were mistaken and said I would be happy to make any changes and asked how they would like us to change or what we should do to be in compliance with their policies. Here is the reply I got today:
"We reviewed your account and the information you provided, and we decided that you may no longer use Amazon Pay. We may not reply to further emails about this issue."

Ha. Welcome to our future. All decisions will be made by bots or humans acting like bots. No need for explanations or conversation.

c.gingerich · « **Reply #2 on:** March 04, 2020, 11:26 AM »

That sucks. Sorry this happened mouser!

mouser · « **Reply #3 on:** March 04, 2020, 11:44 AM »

It's ok, we don't depend on amazon pay for much.. Just frustrating and many wasted hours coding support for amazon pay processing.

Deozaan · « **Reply #4 on:** March 04, 2020, 11:50 AM »

Does Amazon have a "support" Twitter account or other public-facing social outreach? Maybe if we all collectively nagged someone we can be relatively sure is an actual human being, we can get someone to look at and provide an informative response to this.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

EDIT: Found one. @AmazonHelp

nickodemos · « **Reply #5 on:** March 04, 2020, 02:08 PM »

Honestly I can see where amazon wants to drop something quickly and not leave a chance to fight. Think how many hundreds of thousands of issues arise like this and they do not want to get into a word war as it wastes time and money on their part.

Sorry you and the site got rolled over like this but honestly your better off finding something else as long run you will spend way to much time trying to get back to normal only to get flagged again at a later date.

Really seems to me major corporations are slowly forcing bitcoin to the front and all these charging institutions are going to lose so much for it.

cranioscopical · « **Reply #6 on:** March 04, 2020, 02:12 PM »

we decided that you may no longer use Amazon Pay. We may not reply to further emails about this issue

A tour de force of arrogance and stupidity. The author of that should have his bot smacked!

IainB · « **Reply #7 on:** March 05, 2020, 04:01 AM »

@cranioscopical:

A tour de force of arrogance and stupidity.
-cranioscopical (March 04, 2020, 02:12 PM)

I didn't know you spoke German! Impressed.

ConstanceJill · « **Reply #8 on:** March 05, 2020, 07:00 AM »

That sounds more french than german, though.

IainB · « **Reply #9 on:** March 05, 2020, 02:17 PM »

That sounds more french than german, though.
-ConstanceJill (March 05, 2020, 07:00 AM)

Mais oui, c'est vrai!

Deozaan · « **Reply #10 on:** March 05, 2020, 02:52 PM »

Does Amazon have a "support" Twitter account or other public-facing social outreach?

EDIT: Found one. @AmazonHelp
-Deozaan (March 04, 2020, 11:50 AM)

Looks like even the Twitter account is run by useless bots.

I contacted them with a complaint about the generic answer with no information given, and linked to this thread for full details and context. They responded with a generic apology and asked for details and context.

wraith808 · « **Reply #11 on:** March 05, 2020, 03:06 PM »

https://help.twitter...-tweet#source-labels

The tweet is posted by Sprinklr (https://www.sprinklr.com/), i.e. a Bot.

Deozaan · « **Reply #12 on:** March 05, 2020, 03:21 PM »

The tweet is posted by Sprinklr (https://www.sprinklr.com/), i.e. a Bot.
-wraith808 (March 05, 2020, 03:06 PM)

I don't see that posting with Sprinklr necessarily means a bot wrote the tweet. But rather it was tweeted with an app that provides a unified social media presence, and has been granted permission to post to the Twitter account. Or in other words, it's a Twitter client.

wraith808 · « **Reply #13 on:** March 05, 2020, 09:32 PM »

I didn't think it was a twitter client from looking at it, but rather an automated way to post to different social media.

Deozaan · « **Reply #14 on:** March 06, 2020, 12:09 AM »

I think it enables both. It allows you to post to various social media from a single location (write once, deploy everywhere). But it also allows you to receive and respond to messages on specific social media services.

app103 · « **Reply #15 on:** March 06, 2020, 02:33 AM »

I think it enables both. It allows you to post to various social media from a single location (write once, deploy everywhere). But it also allows you to receive and respond to messages on specific social media services.
-Deozaan (March 06, 2020, 12:09 AM)

Write once, deploy everywhere, and never have to bother logging into any of the sites where you deploy, or bother reading any responses. It's a one-way approach to social media that lots of big companies take. In fact, it's pretty much how we approach social media, too, since our Twitter and Facebook posts are all automated through a 3rd party service, using an RSS feed.

If anyone wants to get our attention and the post isn't here on this forum, or in the IRC channel, or an e-mail to mouser, there's a good chance that nobody will see or respond to it. Trying to get our attention on Facebook is not as effective, and getting our attention on Twitter is near impossible.

And this is no different than most companies, that use these platforms to broadcast content, rather than as chat platforms.

wraith808 · « **Reply #16 on:** March 06, 2020, 10:19 AM »

So close enough to a Bot that it might as well be one.

$:-\$

IainB · « **Reply #17 on:** March 07, 2020, 07:46 AM »

@mouser:

Amazon Pay, which we allow people to use to buy commercial licenses for our software from our commercial license page, has decided to block us and refuse to process payments to us.
They have said it is related to us looking like a charity, but won't elaborate or tell us what we could do to fix the problem.
-mouser (March 04, 2020, 08:51 AM)

I would suggest that the statement that "Amazon Pay has decided to block donationcoder payments" may possibly be an incorrect statement and thus not necessarily true.
Clearly, it would seem that payments to DC have been blocked, but the underlying reasons for this - i.e.; the rule that is apparently being broken and which their actions are intending to fix, are variously unclear, obscure, ambiguous.

I would suggest:

There has been a process change by Amazon. They will have made the change deliberately and for a reason.
Amazon will have probably carefully considered the likely effects on their "customers" and will therefore presumably have thought the matter through.
Amazon will necessarily have a one size fits all (mass production) business process approach. These processes will almost certainly be in statistical control. Amazon would be able to anticipate, but be unable to deal individually with, the (possibly unknown/unquantifiable) number of clients that this process change (blocking) may have unfairly inconvenienced (creating special causes of undesirable errors), and so they will no doubt be collecting and studying the data on the number of blowback reports they receive to establish a strategy to mitigate the adverse effect of genuinely unfair/incorrect blocking (smoothing out the special causes).
This could take some time.
Meanwhile, don't expect them to fix anything, but keep reporting the adverse incidents/effects on your business, which they can use to get a clearer picture of the problem that they probably knew they would create with the process change. Their own service level performance statistics will also provide important metrics.
Squeaky wheels may or may not help.
If they don't fix it, then they will have wittingly isolated DC and other clients as being on the margin of their desirable customer base, and they either don't want or can no longer support such fringe clients, but are unable to admit to this as it may be in breach of their blanket service agreement.
So it may be prudent to now start looking for another provider of that service, or some way to bypass your dependency on it.
Experience of setting costing and pricing structures for large-scale computer service suppliers indicates that one could anticipate that the service being blocked will probably start to cost users more, regardless - i.e., a price increase for minor clients or those riding on the coat-tails of marginal costing for major clients may even be one of the supplier's objectives.

opususa · « **Reply #18 on:** March 25, 2020, 06:52 AM »

Sorry about the situation. I used to sell some products through Amazon and experiences a couple of times of their unreasonable attitude. They have power, but sometimes seem to forget they are benefiting from all sellers which is absolutely equally important as buyers.

djMot · « **Reply #19 on:** March 25, 2020, 07:15 AM »

Is there some reason you couldn't just use PayPal instead?

mouser · « **Reply #20 on:** March 25, 2020, 07:18 AM »

We do use paypal, for almost all the donations that come in -- that's why it's not a catastrophe that amazon pay has crapped out on us.

wraith808 · « **Reply #21 on:** March 25, 2020, 08:40 AM »

Other options that you might consider are liberapay and stripe. I use both of those, and they are pretty easy to integrate.

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #22 on:** March 26, 2020, 07:37 AM »

My brother is an OTR truck driver, and is out of state for months at a time. He recently turned us onto ZellePay which is a really nice fee free service for sending money anywhere fast. He can drop money directly into our account from out on the road with a few clicks, and it's there in seconds.

Might be worth considering.

wraith808 · « **Reply #23 on:** March 26, 2020, 08:46 AM »

I tried ZellePay with my daughter, and there are limits imposed by each bank being transferred from/to that aren't apparent. We spent a couple of days trying to figure out what was wrong before seeing that they had a ridiculous limit on what could be transferred.

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #24 on:** March 26, 2020, 10:44 AM »

I tried ZellePay with my daughter, and there are limits imposed by each bank being transferred from/to that aren't apparent. We spent a couple of days trying to figure out what was wrong before seeing that they had a ridiculous limit on what could be transferred.
-wraith808 (March 26, 2020, 08:46 AM)

Interesting... We haven't had occasion to transfer anything over $1,000, but we have gotten close without any issues. However it most likely varies from bank to bank as to if/when they decide to clench up and whinge..