HG Credit Card Monthly Billing Suggestion

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The Hostgator web hosting thread below was started by twin-dad on 2009-09-27 20:15:02:

Hello —

Have been on board at HG since May 2005 with a Swamp Croc plan and recurring monthly billing.

Most of the time HG charges my PayPal MasterCard with no problem, but once or twice a year the charge doesn’t go through. In my case, it’s always because PayPal happens to be doing a system update when HG attempts to run the charge.

Today I learned a couple things that HG can do differently to make their billing system better. First, here’s the background:

I received the usual HG email reminders that the charge didn’t go through, on 9/17/2009 at 00:58 PST, then on 9/23 at 04:14, and again today 9/27 at 04:09 PST. On 9/17 I logged in and confirmed that my HG billing info was correct. I took no further action because I expected the problem ould take care of itself. That didn’t happen, and today my HG account was almost past due.

So I called PayPal and spoke with Lindsey, employee #75272 earlier this afternoon. She has worked at PayPal for about three years. She said HostGator ran my card twice, on 9/17 at 22:35:34 CST, and again about one hour 35 minutes later, on 9/18 at 00:11:55 CST. Both charges were declined due to PayPal conducting a system upgrade. HG made no further attempts to run my card.

I asked Lindsey what merchants usually do when they retry/reattempt to run their recurring charges. She said the usual pattern is to wait 48 hours and retry the charge, and then to wait another 48 hours or so to do the second and final retry. Lindsey also said that she could not recall seeing a case where other merchants retried their charges so soon after the first attempt failed, as HG did.

I also asked Lindsey how often PayPal updates their network/system. She indicated as often as needed, and emergency patches get applied immediately with no real pattern. But she has noticed that PayPal appears to update the system more often in the late evening hours (Central time) on Thursday and Friday, and in the early morning hours of Saturday and Sunday. Presumably it’s done like this to coincide with lower-than-average transaction volume.

So here’s my suggestion for HostGator’s billing staff:

Please retry failed recurring charges twice, roughly 48 hours after the first attempt, and again about 100 hours after the first attempt. Please continue sending customers the reminder emails, but schedule them to go out after each retry and reword them to say that HG retried the customer’s card on <DATE> at about <TIME>.

If HG retries the failed charges in a batch schedule like this, then it will probably get around the problem of PayPal and other networks doing their regular maintenance in a one or two-day window or at the same time each night. Even if the first reattempt fails, the second one four days later should succeed.

If this suggestion is useful and solves a problem for HostGator, I hope HG will credit my account for a month or two of service as a ‘thank you’.

Regardless, I hope this suggestion helps improve future service for me and other HG customers.

Thank you.

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