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Until recently, when I bought used books from Alibris, I payed with Google Checkout. Then I found something peculiar, it appeared as if Google charged my CC twi
by Maro 17y ago
Until recently, when I bought used books from Alibris, I payed with Google Checkout. Then I found something peculiar, it appeared as if Google charged my CC twice per transaction ('). I went to my Google account, searched around, and found no way to contact Google and ask them what's up. I immediately remembered the stories about people having their accounts killed and not being able to contact Google and get a meaningful answer, because it is their policy not to waste resources on customer support. Google even went to court to defend its practice.
Anyway, I now avoid Google Checkout whenever possible as it's too much of a black box.
(') Alibris customer support told me they aren't actually charging twice the money, the first is a "virtual transaction" that makes sure I have the appropriate funds.
- kgrin 17y agoWe have an app for sale on the Android Market (which uses Google Checkout for transaction processing), and it seems like every week we have a support email claiming we charged them twice. We always apologize (even though it's not our fault), explain how the authorization charge works, assure them it'll be gone in a day, and point them to Google's help (bottom of): http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=118685 http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an... I do wonder why it's done that way on Checkout and not other payment systems, or why it seems more noticeable there; it seems to cause an awful lot of confusion.
- Maro 17y agoEven as a power-user, I can tell you it's confusing as hell. Can't you use PayPal?
- mbrubeck 17y agoThe Android Market application uses only Google Checkout. There's no PayPal (or any other) option.
- sachinag 17y agoI'll tell you why: Google Checkout is doing the same PCI kludge that we do at Dawdle. We only do the $1 authorization charges, and we get people screaming at us all the time. Users hate being "charged" for stuff that they didn't purchase, and lots of people check their stuff online frequently. But it turns out that you can't be PCI compliant if you store credit cards in distributed virtual servers (it violates the physical access tenet), so they can't store CCs. So you have to do an auth and then a reference transaction off of the auth.
- trapper 17y agoI found the same thing. My google-apps account was overcharged ~200$, nothing much, but finding a contact button was next to impossible. Lucky I have some google-fu! I sent an email about a month ago now, still no reply - it's quite shocking really! Edit: I'm not quitting gmail, regardless :)
- anamax 17y agoWere you actually charged twice? Credit cards have long worked on a "authorize first, transact when all information is presented" scheme. (Quick - think of an alternative that addresses fraud.) The only thing that's new is that you can see it, and that has nothing to do with Google.
- Maro 17y agoNo I wasn't. One of them seems to be a "virtual charge" that checks if I have sufficient funds (and allocates them?).
- gcheong 17y agoThis might be an artifact of the way your cc company presents the transactions. BofA shows me a list of "pending" transactions and then the transactions that have actually posted.