We recently wasted 2 precious days working on 2checkout.com integration for DAP – only to find out at the end, that 2CO puts every single transaction through a forced, offline “Fraud Check” process that could take up to 48 hours to complete.
Which means, when your buyer hits the “buy” button on your site to become a member, agrees to pays $9.97 or $17 or $27 or $97, whips out their credit card, enters all of the information, hits “Pay”, and now can’t wait to access your product that you have spent so much time and money in marketing it to them …
… in comes 2CO and completely sabotages your entire effort.
Because it could 2CO up to 48 hours to actually put the charge through.
Which means, the payment is in limbo for 48 hours.
As the seller, you won’t get the money for 48 hours.
You’re not even guaranteed of getting the money, because the transaction could be flagged as “fraudulent” based on some crazy internal policies or rules.
On the flip side (and this is worse), your buyer doesn’t get access to the product he just paid you for, because obviously you can’t give them access to your super-duper-product, because you haven’t even received the money yet!
And if after 48 hours, 2CO comes back and rejects the purchase, there is nothing you can do about it.
Now remember, this is not the buyer’s credit card issuing bank that’s saying it’s a fraudulent charge. This is not a chargeback.This is not Amazon (the merchant) who is doing an “internal check” before shipping your product to you.
This is just the stupid middle man – 2CO – based on their “blackbox” investigations, deciding that it’s an invalid purchase.
Which means your buyer who had a valid card, and has money in his account, just got his purchase rejected.
And you were just stripped of a sale.
I would be shocked if any digital or information product sellers are using 2CO at all.
If you are, then please comment below and enlighten me as to how you are going about doing that. Maybe I’m missing something. But most probably, I’m not.
Because when we tested it ourselves making a test purchase, we saw first-hand what a disappointed buyer and an outraged seller would experience.
2Checkout: Fail.
3 comments ↓
Ravi,
I know that DeskAway (in Mumbai) uses 2Checkout as their payment processor…not sure how they’ve configured it or how they make it work, but DeskAway is a phenomenal project management tool.
I completely agree!
I bought an unrelated product several months ago from a vendor that used “Plimus”. I was forced to go through this exact scenario with Plimus. Unfortunately, you aren’t aware of these restrictions until AFTER you buy the product.
I was so pissed that I will never buy another product from anyone who uses Plimus or similar type of middleman!
Ravi – not quite true — they only do that with a new or dormant account – not ever transaction. One they’ve verified you’re an established vendor, the fraud check stops (except perhaps for unusual transactions that trigger security checks — which should be rare).
I’ve been using 2CO successfully as a paypal alternate for years (selling digital infoproducts) without problems, although I will admit it was a bit disconcerting to see the “FRAUD” emails appearing at first. (Like, they couldn’t think of a friendlier way to phrase the email so it doesn’t freak out both vendor and customer? sheez).
Lou
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