The general implications of this are quite interesting. It means you can compete with Google at anything where really good customer service is an advantage, because the concept of customer service (except at such low granularity as generating good, fast search results) is so alien to their culture.
That's how we kicked their (and Yahoo's, and MSN's) ass in Latin America for search advertising. We spoke the languages, answered the phone, answered emails, dealt with icky non-US forms of payment, walked people through their first ad campaigns, etc.
I think you can generalize this to say "you can compete with companies that focus on scaling to large markets of X by providing services for X which don't scale".
Maybe that's the reason why they're not doing it. Cost of satisfied customer vs. cost to make him happy.
Don't be evil left google and is now at Friendfeed anyways :)
Terespondo.com. Comically tiny team compared to Overture. Yahoo/Overture bought it in 2005. At our high point we handled search advertising for 7 out of the top 10 sites in Latin America: UOL, Buscape, etc. Even MSN became a customer.
Yeah. :) That was by accident though. Tere started out as a metasearch engine and answers service. (I was an early contractor. I left for a few years then came back after they switched to ads and landed the MSN contract.)
The technology was very lean and cheap -- Lackner, Leo, Drago, Paterlini, and Freitas are real hackers. But it wasn't sophisticated compared to Google then or Panama now. Our advantage was that when the phone rang a real human said "Bom Dia".
Amy's problem is not rare. It's one of Google's weak points.
Even, for a small company, something like adwords. The problem I have with AW is that if I change the wording of an ad (say, to add the price, or change the price or other "trivial" changes), I have to wait DAYS for the ads to run. I know others who say their changes take effect within a few minutes. I get no direct answer other than "we try to treat all of our customers equally."
I think I draw a flag because I sell educational software, and they want to make sure that I'm not selling homework answers or term papers (or whatever they are worried about). I would benefit from some sort of flag that says they've checked me out N times, I'm probably good for the N+1st time (with maybe random checks afterwords). Or let the ads run and check concurrently.
For example, I shop sometimes in a supermarket that lets me scan the items with a handheld scanner and pay at a self-checkout lane. When I first started doing it, I was randomly (?--I assume) audited fairly frequently. But after very many (over 8 months maybe?) honest check-outs, I haven't been audited in at least two months. It seems I've earned some trust, and I find myself shopping there more because of the convenience.
Putting some sort of trust-factor into Adwords would be useful for me. Alternatively, somebody that could get me the returns that Adwords can (big hurdle) but puts in a trust factor would get my attention.
There is some trade-off between efficiency and friendliness, as long as friendliness requires some real human services (which is likely the case for the foreseeable future). Of course, there is definitely room to provide more of both, but trade-off exists nonetheless.
When a typical merchant signs up for a service, she'd look first for the expenses involved. If a non-free service springs up even with a great customer service, there is little chance they will get enough scale to compete successfully in the long run. As long as most merchants don't have big problems with mostly automated (and less friendly) services like this, Web-based payment services will stick to this free model.
That's an issue with this 'free' economy. Nothing is really free. We've collectively given up human customer service to get these 'free' services.
aggregate (n): a sum total of many heterogenous things taken together
granular (adj): composed of or covered with relatively large particles
You mean that Google provides services that scale - like a fully automated checkout system, and doesn't provide services that don't scale - like personal support. I don't know if it'll end up being a wise one, but it's certainly an interesting business decision they've made...
there are already lots of credit card processors that compete on service. they cost more to use (both in fees and your labor to setup). people buy on cost then wonder why their cheaper solution isn't as good as the pricier one. like people who buy the cheapest airline ticket then gripe that the food wasn't good. you get what you pay for.
IMO, this is a problem with many things - it's very easy to focus on that which is quantifiable, and ignore the fuzzier stuff. For instance, I did a comparison of Linode and Slicehost which has proved quite popular, but one of the things I stated up front was that while it's possible to measure costs and things like memory and disk, it's not really possible to easily compare service, especially as for the most part, hosting is invisible, and service only becomes critical in an emergency.
Economics in general suffers from this problem too. It's easy to quantify things related to money, but much more difficult to deal with the benefits from more abstract things.
Service is a feature that's much harder to quantify, but there _are_ ways of demonstrating it. One of the best recent examples I've seen is http://www.engineyard.com/, which lists its sales & support phone numbers on the header of each page. In this day and age, where phone numbers are being increasingly hidden, a company that stands out like that really makes a good impact.
That's right in general, but a payment processor cutting off the service without notice or explanation isn't comparable to bad food on a cheapo flight. It's more like offloading passengers during a stopover in Mogadishu.
It sounds like they make decisions when confronted with heaps of data. A billion searches? Sure, we can figure out what worked & what didn't. Versus a few dissatisfied customers, orders of magnitude too small to train models on.
Also, given that engineers have to design their services to scale well, perhaps the answer is that we just don't know how to build cheap customer service yet? Perhaps they need a Mechanical Turk like interface for CSRs.
It's not just "dissatisfied customers." It's any customers at all.
I dare you to try to get an answer from Google about how your site is indexed, or about how to accomplish something in analytics. There are several Google products where the only support option available is to post in a Google Support Group and pray that an engineer responds.
WTF? I say "Not only Google, but pretty much any other large co has crappy customer service. Let's compete on good customer service!".
Was your reply supposed to be an objection of some sort that I missed? What are you disagreeing with? Yeah, and what's up with 17 people who upmodded it?!
Thanks for posting this. Since I haven't seen any positive comments about Checkout in the comments, so far, I figured I'd chime in.
I've been using Checkout since about January 2007 to sell digital resources through my site gmathacks.com. In that time, I've had thousands of purchases through Checkout with gross sales well over $100k.
Having had problems with PayPal before (not with this business, but a previous one), I was careful from the outset -- I generally err on the side of refunding people, I follow Checkout's procedure (click the "shipped" button, even though it's a digital product, etc.) to a "t," and I do the best I can with customer service in general.
My experience has, quite simply, been great. Checkout's algorithm seems to reject some purchasers more readily than other systems do (often, I think, because their IP doesn't match the country in their credit card address), which is better than a recent experience of mine through PayPal, when a $200 purchase was reversed weeks later because of a fraud concern. (Which turned out to be false.)
All the while, the fees charged have been way cheaper than PayPal's. (This, unfortunately, is changing. Depending on your monthly sales, Checkout fees are going up as much as 40% in the next month or two.)
I will say that little has happened to turn Checkout against me -- in 2+ years, my chargeback rate is just a shade over 0.1%. And as noted, I'm aware of some of the risks, so I've trod carefully.
All of this certainly isn't a defense for Checkout's (non-existent?) customer service and apparently faulty algorithms. But...while I'm glad to be aware of situations like this, I'll continue to happily use Checkout and recommend to others that they do the same.
Ok, now we have two self-selected samples of experiences with Google checkout.
While I appreciate your post, I'd like to point out that statistically speaking, we still have learned nothing about the risk/benefits associated with using Google checkout. sigh
I wonder why Google closed the account: was it that b/c she never clicked "Shipped" to any of the orders and so Google's algorithm thought the account fraudulent, or was there another reason?
If Google doesn't come clean on the reason, it's going to lose a lot of future customers.
When things can go as bad as in the Slash7 story, statistics totally lose their importance in my opinion. I will never ever pay for a service knowing that it may turn on me like that.
All the while, the fees charged have been way cheaper than PayPal's. (This, unfortunately, is changing. Depending on your monthly sales, Checkout fees are going up as much as 40% in the next month or two.)
In defense of Google, they've been losing money on Checkout from day 1. Everyone knew (or should have known) they would have to raise rates eventually. They've been low to try to convince people to get used to using Checkout. It hasn't actually worked very well and I'm guessing the Checkout folks would rather continue to lose money to gain customers, but with the belt-tightening at Google I guess they've got to prove they're a worthwhile business to have on the books.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, it's a very damaging piece for google not to respond to. After reading it, I'm very hesitant to use their checkout service - it simply isn't worth the risk.
Hopefully google can step away from their usual "no-comment" ethos and explain a bit about their termination process, and how they try to be fair. If not, this will undoubtedly show up on searches for their checkout service, and lead quite a few people away from it.
A year or two ago I used Google Checkout for an online product which sold a few hundred dollars worth. I got a couple of emails from Google saying to "Make sure to ship the products" or something like that. Since they were virtual goods, I didn't bother to go to Google Checkout and click "Shipped" or whatever.
Fast forward about a year, and I log in to Google Checkout to a message that says "Your account has been closed. We can't tell you why. There is no appeal".
The funniest part was I was trying to BUY something with Google Checkout.
I think it's bad practice to not tell someone why their account was closed. I understand if it was because I never clicked "Shipped" or whatever, but I don't even know if that's the reason.
Luckily there are alternatives to Google Checkout. I just wish Google treated their customers nicer. Especially because myself and my company spend over six figures a year on AdWords.
There's a difference between "don't use Google" and "don't use Google for business."
A story like this turns me off Google in a big way if I'm using them for anything at all commercial. I don't want to have to worry about the stuff I'm doing. The idea of Google Checkout is to make my life easier. They're failing that in a big way.
It's not even a lack of trust of Google. I think Google's a good company that's just stupid in some ways. It's more a matter of, I don't want to bother with that stuff. I'll find somebody easier.
A commercial relationship is (or should be??) "higher touch" then a consumer one - but google don't want that at all. So that alone makes commercial usage a risk.
Unless and until you're bringing in real money for Google, make no mistake: you're in a consumer relationship with them, not a commercial one.
A merchant that's sold a few hundred dollars worth of stuff is never going to be important enough to Google to bother putting a real person on. It may suck, but that's the way it is.
If the vendor in question had a few more zeroes on their sales figures, Google would make sure that the complaints were valid before shutting them down.
But I agree fully with the basic point - any small vendor should think twice before relying solely on Google Checkout.
I'm also quite surprised to hear this about google (of all companies), considering their Do-No-Evil claim.
Terminating accounts without notice would be such an obvious and unnecessary evil that I wonder whether perhaps the mail just got lost in this particular case?
Still, providing no obvious contact info for inquiries is a showstopper either way. How am I supposed to trust someone with my money when that someone isn't even willing to talk to me in case of problems?
Yeah, dealing with money is a tricky business, and I could understand them being very harsh about terminating accounts. But there must be some contact and process of winding things down (getting the money owed from google, etc.). Just like you said - You can't trust someone unwilling to talk to you if there's a problem.
But then this is google, and they've worked hard to automate things more than any other company. In some cases, perhaps they've automated things farther than their technology is ready to take them.
I've always viewed the 'Do No Evil' mantra in the same vein as the 'Don't think of a pink elephant dancing the salsa in your pyjamas'.
What are you thinking of right now?
[Edit] Seriously. If you go to work everyday and someone tells you to 'Do No Evil', my bet is that you'll be thinking more about Evil (even just to avoid it) than you will about Good. Add that to human filters like uncertainty, laziness, or optimism, and that 'evil' gets released into the world. As a buzz phrase 2001, it was great; as a corporate mantra 2009, it's biting them on the ass.
It's also pretty typical for a one-on-one interactions with Google. Check out all the people who had their AdSense accounts frozen for "click fraud" with no recourse or detailed explanation.
On a previous posting here at HN I noticed comments about google checkout (in comparison to other ones) which has already scared me off ever using it - there is still a lot of choice out there, when it comes to money, you want a human to talk to.
Google trusts algorithm, not people, and this is what gets them into potential PR disasters like this.
Whether the closing of the account was right or not doesn't really matter here, what does matter is that this doesn't convey trust in Google at all. The accountholder is left with no options, and money that has outright been stolen from him by Google - at least this is what the the rest of the world sees.
The interesting thing here is that any competent PR or HR person would be able to tell you that this code of conduct was a PR disaster waiting to happen, but apparently the engineers got the last word.
It's OK to do regression testing on which words in a CV makes you a potential succesfu hire based on past history (which Google does), but it's not OK to let it replace the hiring process completely.
That's what seems to have hapened here. Google should hire some good people-people. They need it.
In retrospect, this is a bad business for Google to have gotten into for that reason. They are not good with the type of problems that come up.
I was using paypal the other day & thinking the same thing about them. I came to the conclusion that they never would have made it today. Paypal is harder to use & more confusing then the Banks' online banking platforms. In a way, that's a huge missed opportunity. If they were the super-easy-to-use-and-understand-without-feeling-dumb type of company, they might have taken a stab at being an online bank.
They did succeed because the technology was the key. From reports, the technology was just so far ahead of anyone else' that nothing else mattered.
Google is not in that boat. There are all sorts of solutions and they all work. It's not adwords where "it's my way or the high way".
I used to work with the anti-fraud folks at PayPal. Most of them jumped ship to Google about 2 years ago. PayPal was data driven, but required a human to verify the results. Google is simply data driven. That should help explain why they seem even worse than PayPal.
I would have guessed that if you wanted to create a paypal for the next ten years you would want to go the opposite direction on the technology >> people friendliness continuum.
There is a lot to be done on making payment online painless & friendly. There is lots to be done in making accepting money easier and friendlier. There is even more to be done in making managing money cleverly easy.
I'm not sure how much work is still to be done on making those things safe & fraud proof. That happens less publicly. Could be a lot to do. But I suspect that the projectile in the other direction.
Not having the chance to try Google Checkout as a Canadian merchant (it wasn't available to Canadian merchants at the time we made our payment solution decision), I'm reminded of a very early quote from Max Levchin when he discusses one of the first years after Paypal launched.
The quote attributed almost the entire first year of Paypal to fraud. Running and managing 3 CPA campaigns I can now understand why, it seems like everyone with a (stolen) credit card tries to extract the money through online scams.
It should have been clearly visible at the time that choosing Google Checkout would have been a risky decision as a merchant because Google was going to inevitably go through some of the same growing pains. Luckily for us, we dodged that bullet - but by no means is payment integration and fraud detection easy.
At the risk of being a shameless karma whore, let me note that Levchin's interview in Founders At Work is great and includes a lot of discussion of this issue. Here's a quote that leaps out at me today:
LEVCHIN: It's one of those things where, in the end, fraud is so nondeterministic that you need a human or a quantum computer to look at it and sort of make a final decision, because, in the end, it's people's money. You don't really want some computer saying "$2.00 for you, nothing for you." You need a human with a brain to say, "Hmm. This looks like fraud, but I really don't think it is."
This sounds like the google algorithm for account termination has some hair-trigger based on chargebacks.
It basically means that a disgruntled (or just plain vindictive) customer can take you out on a whim regardless of the truth of the claim.
The google model is not based on wetware or 'operators standing by'. It is based on arrays of machines running code that will spit out notifications (if their fraud alert is triggered) that are designed to discourage you from ever calling. There isn't anyone back there. In this case you get what you pay for and your business is just hanging in the breeze.
Matt Cutts responded in the comments that he will take a look at it. I guess this teaches us that the only way to get help from Google is to blog, get it picked up by the aggregators, get a "celebrity" blogger to notice, and hope he follows through. That's not encouraging.
Of course, many big companies have the same problems... so, can we propose a better way without it involving call centers or other massive human investment? Some human investment is great, but any solution involving "hire lots of people to help" won't fly.
Yes, I saw that this morning. (Was out and about yesterday.)
For my follow up, I was planning to say essentially what you've said:
If it takes a massive blog publicity campaign to get somebody to look into it, there's still something rotten in Denmark. (Aaaand... nobody's contacted me about the $2k from the Scriptaculous Adsense money.)
If google wants to close accounts, that's their right, it's not evil (though it may be a good reason to choose their competitor), but they should pay out the balance on the account first!!
My statement says X is not evil but Y is. Then you replied saying the combination of an aspect of X, with Y, is evil.
Your reply is consistent with my statement, not contradictory, and is indeed a weaker statement. I say Y is wrong straight out, but you only criticize it in the presence of something else.
Yet you seem angrier than me, e.g. the CAPS, and you presented your comment as being about how Google is more evil than I said. So you or I must be misunderstanding something here.
Google seems to generally ignore customer support altogether.
My company used to pay $750/yr for their anti-spam enterprise scanning package they sell as a separate product from Google Apps. When I contacted them, via email, about a bug I had found, they said email support was only available to customers that spend $1000/yr or more. They sent me a link to their Google forums...
I love using Google services: Search, Maps, Gmail, and so on but I've not seen any evidence that even have non-technical support staff. If you call, they can't direct you anywhere. It doesn't seem like a smart place to do business.
The Apps/Enterprise divsion has a support staff and they were helpful when I setup our domain email accts. and with our enterprise licensing of gMaps API.
PayPal killed lots of accounts to fight fraud, pissing off lots of people. I think payments makes for an adversarial business, making customer support harder.
Is it possible that people paid for the book, and then some kind of technical issue prevented them from being able to download the book? I am also selling digital content and this is my #1 concern regarding payment processing.
Now, I am using PayPal's authorize-and-settle function. I don't settle the transaction until I see in my logs that the user has downloaded the item. If more than a few hours has passed then I email the customer and ask them if they are having some kind of problem with the download.
I had an experience where a customer purchased software (about $400 worth) and then after 2 months claimed they never received the email containing the license keys. I attempted to email them through many various routes (eventually from my own google and ISP accounts, even) but they kept claiming they did not receive any email from me. I don't really know if this is true, but if it is, they have the most aggressive SPAM filtering in the universe since I have never experienced this from any other customer. In the end, they issued a chargeback and told VISA it was fraud, and the payment processor, ShareIT refunded the money. ShareIT is pretty expensive, but I must say they were very good about it - they communicated with me directly (real humans), seemed to understand the situation and have not held it against me in any way (as far as I can tell).
(no particular point to this, just thought the story might be interesting to others.)
I don't believe so, I haven't heard from any users about any issues except with spam blockers. And those folks emailed me, I resent them a download link myself, and then they always wrote back "yeah... it was in spam."
EDIT: And we had maybe 10 orders go through Google Checkout, max (thus the $200ish amount). The other 470 or so went thru PayPal.
Since you only had 10 orders go through Google Checkout, it is possible there were maybe 4 or 5 additional fraudulent orders which raised some red flag in Google's algorithm. Then again, it could actually be a bug in their algorithm
Still, the issue is that Google provides no way of finding out the cause.
From selling apps through iPhone app store - there are always people who can't figure something out and instead of contacting the seller they lash out in comments and then leave without a trace. Sometimes they just give you a one-star and leave and you have no idea why. Happens all the time, could have happened to you as well.
Do what briansmith suggests, you just can't be too cautious.
One obvious lesson here is "read your TOS agreements carefully." In this case, Google seems to reserve for itself rights that most people would find absurd. It's too bad it took an incident like this to publicize them.
They sound exactly like PayPal. When they closed my account, I had about 100,000 successful payments, my own "personal account manager" and all that jazz. One day they noticed we had an adult section and closed our account without any warning and completely stonewalled any attempt to contact them. $200? Good for you, we lost about £1500.
At least when our Bank objected to our XXX section, they gave us time to do something about it. Of course, PayPal also didn't want quarter of a million in a bond to insure against chargebacks.
Google check-out completes their advertising chain management, enabling assessable advertising. Instead of pay-per-click, you can pay-per-pay. It really is a fantastic concept for trying to optimize marketing automatically.
Problem: they suck at it.
So... this function really helps their mission, but they can't do it. Therefore, they should outsource this function, or spin off a startup so that it can operate on the values needed for success in it.
And what would you suggest that backup plan should be? Keep in mind that the false positive rate is probably about 1 out of 100, and fraudsters are going to get really big payouts if they figure out a way around your backup plan.
You can't have an attorney represent you in small claims court, but can someone else file and appear on your behalf? If so, perhaps someone in the Bay Area should setup a company that helps people sue Google in small claims court. Charge a couple hundred bucks or something.
No, you cannot represent somebody else in small claims court, even if you are a licensed attorney. The plaintiff and the defendant must represent themselves. If either one is a corporation, then an employee of the corporation (not a hired lawyer or consultant) must represent the corporation.
"116.540. (a) Except as permitted by this section, no individual other than the plaintiff and the defendant may take part in the conduct or defense of a small claims action."
Most of the exceptions detail that the person appearing has to be a regular employee of the plaintiff, if not the plaintiff themselves.
You're usually required to file in the defendant's court, and with good reason. The judge will likely toss the case out unless you have a really good reason for not filing here.
There is no legal obligation to file in the Defendant's court. US law allows a lawsuit to be filed in (1) the plaintiff's home court, (2) the defendant's home court, or (3) the home court of the jurisdiction where the events giving rise to the lawsuit took place.
Forum selection clauses ARE NOT BINDING UNLESS SIGNED IN WRITING. Most courts will not honor forum selection clauses between consumers and corporations due to the unfair bargaining power in the relationship. The other primary justification is that the corporation can afford to travel to a city where they willingly do business (i.e., provide goods or services.)
CHOICE OF LAW CLAUSES ARE BINDING. That simply means that the the court hearing the case may have to apply the law of a different state.
Paypal's gotten a lot better. In part, probably, due to maturity and loud-mouthed complainers (I'll count myself in that group), and probably because of the govt stepping in and forcing them to act like the financial institution that they are.
You can call PayPal. There are actual people. They may be stubborn, but they are there. You can find out why your account is closed. And there are precedents.
Google Checkout: no contact. You can't call them. You can't email them. You can't appeal. No one, as far as I've been able to tell, is in charge of this beast.
I would sue them if it made business sense. But I can't file in small claims court in the right district, and it would end up costing me much more in time and effort to recover the money.
Which is probably why you don't hear about people suing them all the time.
I don't believe thats true. Almost any terms of service agreement specifies that any lawsuit takes place in the company's jurisdiction. Read any credit card contract, and you'll see that if you sue, you gotta go up to Delaware.
Sadly you can arbitrarily declare where someone can sue you. In legal terms it is called a "forum-selection clause" and is common in almost every contract you will read here in the US. The party designates what court will hear any dispute regarding the nonperformance of the contract. Google does have a forum-selection clause in their terms of service for Google Checkout so to sue for breach of contract she would have to file in the court stated in the terms of service for Google.
One option would be for her to file with a local court and seek jurisdiction. This would be time consuming and costly though. I am not sure exactly how this would work with her being in the UK.
It's not that crazy if you think about it. We have 50 different sets of state contract law and precedence to deal with (unlike your 13 superior courts to watch) and a larger amount of interstate commerce and contracts to be handled. Compounding the problem is that fact that state laws regarding contracts can vary quite widely. While some companies may wish to restrict jurisdiction to states that have a pro-business bias this is less of a factor than you might think (companies sue each other far more often than consumers sue companies) and what most companies are looking for is a single standard to use for the contract. No one wants to learn the hard way that some state changed a law six months ago which completely hoses you for liability or contract enforcement and if a contract could not specify a jurisdiction then companies would be forced to stay up to date on new legal precedents and new legislative efforts in all fifty states.
You can try to change the jurisdiction, but it is hard to do this for a very specific reason.
Yeah,it is a little crazy, but kind of makes sense if you think about it when it comes to preventing frivolous lawsuits.
There are ways around it, and as you pointed out you can file locally and try to convince the local court that i should take jurisdiction over the case. But this would cost you money and time. Plus, you would have an uphill battle trying to convince a court to overturn a clause you agreed to in the first place.
While you cannot always do it, at least in the states, if you are negotiating a contract for your business try to get the other party to agree to dual jurisdiction. Basically stating that your local court or their local court can have jurisdiction over the contract. Some parties will agree outright, others will want it to say something like if they sue you it has to be in your court, but if you sue them it has to be in their court.
You can have a contract that has a "forum-selection clause" but it's far less binding that people assume. For example if there was fraud or duress or undue influence involved in the signing of the contract then the entire contract can be worthless including the "forum-selection clause".
FORUM SELECTION CLAUSES ARE NOT BINDING ABSENT A SIGNED WRITTEN CONTRACT. EVEN WITH A CONTRACT, ALMOST NO COURT IN THE US WILL HONOR A FORUM SELECTION CLAUSE BETWEEN A CONSUMER AND A CORPORATION.
Think about it: if forum selection clauses did have legal effect (between consumers and corporations), you wouldn't be able to sue most companies unless you were willing to go to Delaware (where roughly 90% of naitonal US corps are headquartered). The reason we have lawsuits everywhere is precisely b/c you can file anywhere, even despite a forum selection clause.
ONLY BUSINESSES NEED TO WORRY ABOUT FORUM SELECTION CLAUSES.
That statement is wrong. Forum selection clauses are binding absent a signed written contract. For example, one of the more famous cases setting precedent for forum selection clauses involved Carnival Cruise Lines. In that case a passenger injured on a cruise attempted to sue Carnival in the passenger's local jurisdiction. Carnival countered that because there was a forum-selection clause in the contract printed on the back of the passenger's ticket that the passenger should be forced to sue Carnival in Florida. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court which ruled that the forum-selection clause on Carnival's ticket was fair and reasonable and enforceable against the passenger. Check out Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v Shute 499 US 595, 111 S.Ct122 (1991) for details on this exact case.
Now I am by no means saying that forum-selection clauses are an end all to potential contract lawsuits (key here being contract disputes and not just any lawsuit between a plaintiff and defendent corporation). There are ways to fight the forum-selection part, but you must be prepared to fight it and pay the legal expenses involved. Sometimes it is a matter of weighing the cost versus the outcome sadly and that is why corporations end up avoiding the lawsuits in contract disputes.
Check the case again: this case is only mandatory precedent for ADMIRALTY cases. While strongly persuasive precedent, b/c it is SCOTUS, it has not been followed in the state courts.
The whole reason for founding in Delaware is the favorable legal structure. You certainly have a solid case if they truly took $2300 from you without cause and I imagine that once you retain a lawyer and file some paperwork they will settle rather than fight you and lose over such a small sum. You might end up spending $1000 to get it back but for pride's sake its worth it.
There is no legal obligation to file in the Defendant's court. US law allows a lawsuit to be filed in (1) the plaintiff's home court, (2) the defendant's home court, or (3) the home court of the jurisdiction where the events giving rise to the lawsuit took place.
Forum selection clauses ARE NOT BINDING UNLESS SIGNED IN WRITING. Most courts will not honor forum selection clauses between consumers and corporations due to the unfair bargaining power in the relationship. The other primary justification is that the corporation can afford to travel to a city where they willingly do business (i.e., provide goods or services.)
CHOICE OF LAW CLAUSES ARE BINDING. That simply means that the the court hearing the case may have to apply the law of a different state.
TALK TO A LAWYER. Don't trust random comments on an online technology discussion board, especially where those comments claim that you don't have legal rights.
The only way a lawsuit would happen is if someone gets interested in a class action lawsuit. That's a bit of a long shot, but this thread helps. You could do the online petition thing too to start documenting the number of people screwed this way.
Brief update (will write more in depth later today):
Some Google person with no last name & a fake-sounding first name (Sophie?) wrote me a very impersonal, automated sounding email that said:
"During a recent review it has come to our attention that your merchant
account ID amy@slash7.com was closed due to a technical error. We
apologies for the inconvenience it might have caused. We have re-activated
your account and you are eligible to receive payouts."
Riiight. A recent review. Guess that had nothing to do with the fact that you guys made this topic a front page news item.
So now I've got my $200. Hoo-ray.
But this is ridiculous. I don't care about the money. I will never use Google Checkout again, once my money is out.
And I plan to continue to agitate for them to improve their policies, because I know I'm not alone in being ripped off... I'm just more loudmouthed and vindictive than most people.
Also, no word at all on the over $2,000 USD that was in the script.aculo.us Adsense account.
That's Google essentially stealing from an open source project. I just can't believe it.
By the way... My thanks to all the people outside & especially inside of Google who have tried to look into this case to the best of their ability. I truly appreciate it.
The problem is that it's no one's fault that my account got closed, and therefore no one's responsibility to fix it, either.
Did you miss the part where they kept the client's money, with no explanation whatsoever, and the client's only recompense is to sue Google, probably costing more money in the end?
For a lot of people, that's close to some definition of evil at any rate. Either that or incompetence. But when it comes to money, most people view incompetence that ends up with their money being stolen as pretty much the same as evil.
