Donations Not Processing / Apex governor limit warning

[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

[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]

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!

[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 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!

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]

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!

The Connect platform is being used and transactions are going through without any issues. I forgot that you are using Connect and reviewed your account and the originating IP's so in using Connect that is not an issue. It was just a comment.

We have reviewed it and don't see any issues. I am not making any accusations or being defensive and sorry that you think that way.

The platform is being used and while we receive bug reports occasionally we immediately update them. Every single bug in forms or updates has been fixed and addressed immediately. If there is a bug we fix it. I hope you realize that our pricing model is based on transactions not selling the product and walk away. If you can't accept donations we don't make money - simple. We are watching your account and trying to see if we can find any problems - as of this moment we are not aware of any problems and all tests are successful. As stated payments are being processed continuously.

I don't know what else I can say. Click & Pledge processes payments for over 10K nonprofits worldwide. As stated before if we find an issue we will fix it and as of this moment we can't figure out what has happened to your patrons. We will keep an eye on it and hopefully we can determine the cause, if any.

[geoffccfy]

We don't even see anything hitting our servers ... Not sure what we can help you with at this time.

That is my point, actually. 4 transactions failed - I suspect because the Connect website timed out before they could be processed.

It concerns me that Connect isn't working properly and you guys are unable to identify the cause - or even accept that there is an issue. This has greatly impacted my confidence in the platform.

I've noticed a pattern in the customer support forum that you tend to blame the nonprofit for the issue. In some cases, you have correctly judged that the issue is caused by user or nonprofit. In other cases, not so. It's weird to me that your customer service model is fundamentally defensive in it's interactions with nonprofits.

Is this a custom form you have created or is this from one of our forms?

This is happening on the Connect site, as mentioned mutliple times already. (This is the Connect forum, is it not? I would expect a little more attention to detail in a matter of this significance). It happened with at least 2 of our campaigns, which are just plain old Connect campaigns - nothing fancy, nothing unusual - designed by CnP and hosted on CnP's servers (not ours)

If you are using a form please disable the fraud in the form to ensure you are not being blocked.

For the sake of clarity, I'll reiterate that we aren't using a form or a widget or anything of the sort. We are attempting (with spotty results) to use the Connect Peer-to-Peer platform. I love it's GUI, I love the Salesforce integration. But all of that is useless if it can't process payments.

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

We have not found any issues with your account. We see one decline but outside that there are no issues.

We don't even see anything hitting our servers. If any transaction hits the server it will be saved automatically and then throughout its stage of completion it will be updated. All transactions are first validated then monitored for fraud pattern and next will be posted to the gateway for authorization, and then receipt, Salesforce, and other third party actions are performed and recorded.

We have reviewed all your transactions and see a total of 30 pots for account # 25238 with one decline.

Not sure what we can help you with at this time. Is this a custom form you have created or is this from one of our forms?

I have also noticed that a number of transactions are posted from the same IP - please note that if you are testing your system you need to be careful since repeated attempts will block all future attempts. In this case nothing has been blocked but it could have been blocked if you had done more transactions. For authorizing cards it is best to use the Virtual Terminal. If you are using a form please disable the fraud in the form to ensure you are not being blocked.

[geoffccfy]

Good Day Abdul and Support Department,

Just wanting to check in to see how your investigating is going.

Since the transactions were not declined, my suspect that the information that the Donors (including myself) tried to submit from your webform never made it into your database. In the case of my two failed attempts, it appeared that the submission timed-out. The submission was processing for about 3 minutes (which felt like an eternity) and then the processing window closed and took me back to the information I attempted to submit. No message of any sort appeared - to indicate the donation was successful or that the donation failed. But because the information I tried to submit was still on the webform, I (correctly) intuited that something had gone wrong.

[geoffccfy]

If you believe transactions have failed to post to the bank then they must have declined. All transactions are available for download in the portal. You may also download declined transactions.

I tested your theory that the transactions were declined. From the Portal, I downloaded all declined transactions that have occurred since we opened an account with Click and Pledge.

Only one transaction has been declined. It happened on a different day, and was attempted by a different donor, than the 4 transactions that I know failed to process.

Of the 4 transactions that failed to process:

- one donor immediately navigated to an alternative donation platform (Razoo), which processed her transaction, on the same card, with no difficulty
- one donor emailed us to say he was having troubles. He tried again later the same day, with the same card, and the transaction posted
- I myself attempted to donate. I was testing each of our campaigns to see if it was campaign related. My first two attempts, on two different campaigns, failed. My third attempt (1 minute after the previous two, on our 3rd campaign, using the same credit card) succeeded. I was then able to donate successfully on the first two campaigns.

This evidence indicates conclusively that your theory about what happened is incorrect. Do you have any other theories about why the donations failed to process?

All were on 12/31. Perhaps your servers were unable to handle the volume of traffic that occurred on the last day of the tax year?

[geoffccfy]

thank you for clarifying about Salesforce. That makes sense.

[CnP.Support]

One other note about your error.

That is really not an error but a warning stating that the query limit may be approaching. This is not a Click & Pledge error and is purely a Salesforce warning. Read the email carefully:

Caused the following Apex resource warnings:

CnP_PaaS:Number of SOQL queries: 52 out of 100

As stated this is absolutely harmless and has no implications on your receiving donations, etc. This warning may be disabled through the Salesforce Admin.

Our platform runs a lot of queries to determine contacts, etc. and as such you may see these warnings at times.

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

Transactions failing in Salesforce have absolutely nothing to do with the Bank. Transactions always are sent to the bank and then posted to Salesforce. If there is an issue in Salesforce it will, under no circumstances, block the transaction from posting to the bank.

If you believe transactions have failed to post to the bank then they must have declined. All transactions are available for download in the portal. You may also download declined transactions. If we process them or it hits our system it may be downloaded through the portal as a CSV report. Salesforce post is secondary and all transactions may be posted again from the portal in case the system fails to post due to login errors, etc.

One of our test engineers is reviewing your account to determine the cause of the error you are seeing in Salesforce.