Support ECF - will it be changed to an non-recurring option?

[Rickajho]

Hi

I thought I read a while back that this was going to happen. But I just looked and I only see the recurring option as the only way to do it.

I really don't like sites storing my CC into, especially for a once a year transaction. And in the current state I don't even know if there are options to change or update CC info should you need to change to a different card or update an experation date. Especially since these recurring transactions are handled through third party processors.

It's not that I may not want to support ECF for more than one year. It's just that I would prefer to have a little more control over how I pay for the annual fee. Would it be too hard to just have a "nag notice" sent to members who need to renew for another year instead of having things auto-charged?

Rick

 

[aziffel]

Hi

I thought I read a while back that this was going to happen. But I just looked and I only see the recurring option as the only way to do it.

I really don't like sites storing my CC into, especially for a once a year transaction. And in the current state I don't even know if there are options to change or update CC info should you need to change to a different card or update an experation date. Especially since these recurring transactions are handled through third party processors.

It's not that I may not want to support ECF for more than one year. It's just that I would prefer to have a little more control over how I pay for the annual fee. Would it be too hard to just have a "nag notice" sent to members who need to renew for another year instead of having things auto-charged?

Rick

Yeah!What he said.

 

[CES]

You can go into paypal and remove the auto subscribe option after the fact- it doesn't affect the current year.

 

[rolygate]

Please let me clear up these two issues, CC details and recurring subs:

Credit card details
Websites don't store credit card info normally. We certainly don't - when you go into the payment system you are transferred to the Paypal site, and they have your CC details. We have no idea of your CC details and have no access to them. In order to get those details a site would have to come up with some fancy coding to intercept the encrypted traffic, crack it, and then risk losing their bank privileges for ever. It has been done by hackers but mainly on badly-run servers. You mainly pay your website hosts for security, the other features are extras. We have our own server admin who oversees security, these days it is by far the most important function.

Most online stores / ecommerce sites do not store CC details, after entering your order you will be transferred to their merchant partner, who is the middleman dealing with the bank. It works like this: you type up your order and shipping details in the checkout - when you click the payment details, you go to a new page, this section is called the 'payment gateway' technically - you are transferred out to another website: the merchant partner's secure facility (Paypal, Sagepay etc) - and they take the CC details and interact with your CC card company / bank. The most secure arrangement of all is when the site is hosted within a specialist ecommerce hosting service, who maintain an in-house secure server for the payment gateway transactions. They can set up all sorts of extra firewall protection and so on.

In the past, some ecommerce apps kept CC details but this is rare now. There are still some poorly-run sites using Microsoft apps like the Access database on their server, these are regularly hacked, but they tend to be in 3rd-world countries where hosting is a DIY operation.

Recurring subs
In the past, we had many complaints that the subscription did not recur, and people lost their privileges, their PM mailbox, and so forth. By far the largest number of people want their sub to recur automatically.

It's very easy to cancel it, it takes 30 seconds: go to your Paypal account and cancel the sub. They hold all your personal details, we don't have that.

Alternatively, email our accounts dept and they will do it for you: just send your Paypal email address and a cancellation request to accounts[AT]e-cigarette-forum[DOT]com (rebuild the email address as normal with @ and .com).

Hope this explains things to your satisfaction, please ask for any more clarifications - you are welcome.