Donations Not Processing / Apex governor limit warning

[geoffccfy]

Click & Pledge processes payments for over 10K nonprofits worldwide.

My concern is not how many payments were successfully processed. We had a few dozen successfully process during our end-of-year fundraising push. My concern is how many do not process? How many donors try and fail and walk away?

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

I understand your concern. I cannot see anything being posted to us. I am not sure if the donors that had problem had any network issue or could not connect to us for one reason or another. We have no record of them having posted to us and nothing we can determine. Nothing has hit our servers for these people.

As stated before we process millions and we take every transaction seriously- it is our business. In reviewing your account you have 29 authorized transactions since April 5, 2013 and one declined - the one decline is for the card being declined by the bank and nothing we can do about that.

Our system has issued no warning of network issues and considering we are under 24x7 monitoring by 3 companies for security and connectivity around the world we know with absolute certainty that we have not had network problems. Why your donors could not connect to us? I don't know and we have no way of finding out- nothing has posted to us.

If you hear of any issues next time let us know and we try to figure out if there is a system issue or a local issue.

[geoffccfy]

I am not sure if the donors that had problem had any network issue or could not connect to us for one reason or another.

I am 100% confident that this was not a network issue for 3 of the 4 donations. Two of those donation attempts were my own. At the time of the failed submissions, many other websites I was using were loading fine. And approximately 2 minutes later I was able to make 3 successful donations on Connect.

Similarly, for the 3rd donation... I interviewed this donor extensively. She had no connectivity problems with other sites, and was able to complete the transaction without issue on Razoo immediately subsequent to the failure on Connect.

Nothing has hit our servers for these people.

I believe you when you say this. My point is that your servers are not registering hits. You should look into that. It is possible to examine server performance. If you do not have the expertise in-house to do so, there are folks you can contract to do this for you.

Our system has issued no warning of network issues and considering we are under 24x7 monitoring by 3 companies for security and connectivity around the world we know with absolute certainty that we have not had network problems.

I suggest this is the direction you should investigate, and apparently your hubris will prevent you from doing so. My organization's experience is approximately 10+% of initiated transactions fail due to issues that can only be explained by problems with your server or your code. I was embarrassed to receive calls from donors who sincerely wanted to give but were blocked by your platform. You, too, should be embarrassed.

If you hear of any issues next time let us know and we try to figure out if there is a system issue or a local issue.

Do you have suggestions how "next time" would turn out any differently? If not, I think it wiser for me to find another platform, in order to ensure there is not a "next time."

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

The following provides detailed network stats by a 3rd party which we use for monitoring our site externally every minute from around the world. Here are the stats for the last week of December 2013.

The scan dates are at the top of each image.

Please note that these scans are done 24x7 on 1 minute interval. The moment a network issue is found or we cannot be seen from any of the preset locations around the world the entire network team and I (Kamran Razvan- CEO) are notified. The warnings you may see at times are from single locations which may be due to that locality's issue considering at that time other locations can connect and transact. In Addition to the external scanner we also use 2 internal scanner to monitor each server with complete transaction processing - one scanner resides in the data center and another one in another building from a different network subnet.


Start Date: 2013-12-28
End Date: 2013- 12-29




Start Date: 2013-12-29
End Date: 2013- 12-30




Start Date: 2013-12-30
End Date: 2013- 12-31



Start Date: 2013-12-31
End Date: 2014- 01-01



Start Date: 2014-01-01
End Date: 2014- 01-02



As is evident from the above 3rd party reports our availability during the last week of the year is 100% from around the world.

I appreciate your offer of help but I am not sure we can afford your expertise.

If you wish to close your account please notify our support department and we will notify Transfirst to close your account so you don't incur any monthly fees for a service you won't be using.

Regards,
Kamran Razvan, CEO

[geoffccfy]

I appreciate your offer of help but I am not sure we can afford your expertise.

No worries - I wasn't trying to drum up business for myself. I'm not the guy for that particular job. But you probably should have someone on retainer who can handle such issues.

As is evident from the above 3rd party reports our availability during the last week of the year is 100% from around the world.

Unfortunately, you numerous defenses don't explain why I was twice unable to make a donation while testing the Connect platform.

If you wish to close your account please notify our support department and we will notify Transfirst to close your account so you don't incur any monthly fees for a service you won't be using.

I sincerely was hoping you would help me make sure my donors are successful when they try to give money to my organization through Click and Pledge. Instead you offer to expedite my departure from your client base. That's an ironic twist on customer service!

[Kamran.Razvan]

@geoffccfy,

I am Kamran Razvan, the CEO of Click & Pledge, and want to personally answer your questions. I will not post any additional answers, and you are free to post any additional comments you wish to this thread.

Over the course of this conversation you have posted bits of the thread on the AppExchange without providing the context that those words were written. You have also given the PaaS application a rating of 1 star for an issue that was reported with the Connect platform which has absolutely nothing to do with the Salesforce PaaS platform or anything Salesforce related. Your rating will have an extremely negative impact on our company’s image for a very long time and there is nothing that we can do anything about. Unfortunately in today’s networked world anyone can easily damage a company’s brand without any concern or appreciation of the impact their statements may have on a company’s brand and reputation.

I am sure you will continue taking texts out of context and will post it elsewhere- at this time nothing more or less is expected so I will post this message with that understanding.

The following summarizes all actions that were taken since your first post:

• Based on your report all firewall and load balancer logs were explored and examined for connection issues.
• All third party connection reports were examined and analyzed
• All internal connection reports were reviewed for each individual server in the Connect cluster.
• Firewall & load balancer diagnostics were performed and reviewed.

During the period reported our company shows 100% uptime and not a single connection issue has been identified. Click & Pledge employs N+1 redundancy in all its data center devices and network connections. We use two different companies for the Internet connection with a failover of 10 seconds in case one provider loses connection. The failovers are all automatic but our entire team will be notified immediately of such a failover. We love to identify any issues and always welcome our clients telling us of any issues that they experience or identify. We address every issue and request immediately.

I provided you with images of the third party reports and have repeatedly stated that we will keep an eye on issues and if we find any issues we will correct them. I have also stated before that so far we have not identified any issues.

In your post you wanted us to give you detailed steps that we are going to take to rectify the situation or else you will look for another provider. In reply I stated that the listed evidence shows that we have not had any issues but will keep an eye on the issue & will rectify it if we find it. Considering you asked that you will go elsewhere if we don’t satisfy your inquiries, I stated that if you wish to close your account please let us know.

The thread is open and you may continue the conversation but we will no longer post any replies. This is the last post we will have in this thread. As stated the damage you have done to our brand based is beyond repair or comprehension and one that will stay with our company for a long time considering those comments will never go away.

In closure I wish you success in your fundraising efforts with any company you choose to use, should you choose to close your account with us.

[geoffccfy]

Hi Kamran,

Thank you for the personal response. I regret that you feel that CnP is being unfairly criticized.

You and I have reached an impasse. My organization experienced an unacceptably high failure rate trying to use your platform to process donations. You insist this did not occur. We do not have much middle ground to work through.

We have each had an opportunity to share our positions. If readers find your position compelling, then you need not be worried about your brand image. If readers find my position compelling, you should not be fretting about your image; you should be fretting about your technology.

I also suggest you should be concerned about the financial impact that shortcomings in your platform can have on the nonprofits that rely on you. Two donors took the initiative to contact me about their failed transactions. I have no idea how many donors (for my organization or for other organizations) were unable to donate but did not reach out to problem-solve, and instead decided not to give. You have no idea either - and that's what worries me most about CnP and your response to the issue I reported.

Best regards,
Geoff