Hello, We sell software based services and Plimus is our current credit-card processor. This is a warning to everyone, STAY AWAY from Plimus. We have been with them for 6 months and are jumping ship. Paypal fraud When a customer uses the Plimus gateway to order a product, they are represented with a range of payment methods, the most popular being CC or Paypal. Plimus can essentially accept Paypal payments for you. We run a subscription based service which makes use of the Plimus recurring billing feature; customers order and get billed each month (if they select so). As of the past 2-4 weeks there has been a large error, Paypal renewal payments made through Plimus are never being passed on to us. To put this into perspective: Customers are being charged for their next month of service via Paypal, but their charge is never being sent through Plimus's system. We never receive the funds because the renewal orders do not exist on their system. Customers can not use our service because a) we have not received the payment and b) since the charge is not going through to their system, their IPN is not notifying our system that the customers account needs to be updated for an additional month. Remote subscription cancellations are not working via Plimus's system, so if a customer requests us to cancel, we have to tell them to do it via Paypal independently. If a customer requires a refund, we can not refund them because the order does not exist. We get called fraudulent (because most customers do not understand that billing providers such as Plimus are separate entities) and have had a series of complaints. We refer the customer to email Plimus but they reply back with robotic responses. It is obvious this is a technical error; their Paypal IPN/API setup is broken and is not being fully associated with their main billing system. Customers are essentially being 'raw charged', by this I mean Paypal is billing the customer but Plimus is not acknowledging anything to do with the order. I have emailed them on a number of occasions and they have claimed this is a bug and their engineering team are working on the issue. They have given me no reassurances I will ever receive the funds owed and no estimated time of fix (they ignore these two questions). The very fact I reported this 2-3 weeks ago is frustrating and I am seriously losing patience. Plimus also have a number of other problems, but I will take the time to write another thread at a later date once I am finished with screenshots and factual evidence (trust me, the list is huge). Stuff along the lines of: Very poor order conversion rates due to anti-fraud measures. If a customer does not pick up the phone to verify their order to a Plimus representative their order is cancelled. They also blank page the entire order form if a customer is using an IP address which has been used with past fraud. I guess they have not heard of shared IP addresses, at least show the user an error or something. If a customer typo's part of their address, they are not given the chance to correct it, and instead their order is cancelled due to 'inconsistent billing'. $15 fine if a customer opens a Paypal dispute. Poor support who send robotic responses. Sometimes take days or weeks to reply. No telephone support. Various random bugs, e.g. Paypal once stopped working altogether, again I have these documented and will post at a later date. High commission rates. You are essentially giving away up to 10% of your business to them. Would not be so bad if their service was actually good. Trust me on this one, stay away from them for good.
I am sorry to hear about the problems you have been facing. As I have twice requested on our own forum board for this same posting -- please can you let me have your Plimus Vendor ID details and relevant support ticket numbers so that we can follow up on these problems and review your specific case history. It sounds as if the issue is of relatively recent origin and may be the result of a technical problem. I can fully appreciate your frustration and concern, but to suggest that fraud is involved is not appropriate. Once I have your relevant account information I should be able to help clarify the financial situation. As regards fraud checks -- certain types of products attract more fraud alert cases than others. There is an option to have the fraud checks reduced at your request but you have to bear in mind that this can result in increased risk of cancellations and chargebacks. There is no fine for 'opening a PayPal dispute with Plimus'. In the event that a vendor's overall chargeback rate exceeds 2% of orders then a $15 fee is levied, the vast majority of which represents the charges billed to us by credit card processors in a chargeback situation. In cases where the chargeback rate is under 2% then we bear those charges. Inquiries are handled by our Vendor Support team, and the vast majority of matters are cleared up within 24 hours. Accounts-related matters can take longer. Requests for new features take time to action, but most problems are dealt with quickly, and in the event of delay can be escalated on request. Thanks, Derek, Plimus
thank you for the warning I just wanted to use their system.. and after I read your post I decided not to bother and waste my time using their system. I might just stay with paypal for now.