

CSSmania: Our way of fighting SPAM with submissions - dmarinoc
http://blog.cssmania.com/post/18244313430/our-way-of-fighting-spam-with-submissions

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dangrossman
I sure hope these guys ran this plan past PayPal. A high refund rate is a risk
trigger at any payment processor. It's seen as a possible sign of there being
some kind of fraud or widespread customer dissatisfaction going on, which
might be a predictor for an onslaught of chargebacks. If they haven't vetted
the plan in advance and had someone add some notes to their account, it could
lead to another "PayPal froze our account and we have no idea why" story.

They're a payment processing company, not a free security deposit holding
service. Visa and MasterCard also enforce maximum return rates (as a
percentage of processing volume), so PayPal has incentive not to allow this
kind of use of their service.

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StavrosK
Aren't there services (Square, Amazon) that let you place a hold on the funds
and then either release or charge it? How does kickstarter do it?

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dangrossman
Authorization holds generally only last 1-5 days (there are special rules for
some industries that let them do it longer) -- Kickstarter is probably just
doing a quick $0 auth to check if the card is valid and storing it to auth &
capture again when the project is committed. They're not holding an auth for
your commitment the whole time. That'd tie up money/credit in your account for
a project that might not ever be funded.

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StavrosK
That makes sense, thanks.

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ed209
I understand the motive and for sites like Etsy, charging to list certainly
helps with some poor quality (it doesn't stop bad listings initially, but
eventually when your stuff does not sell you don't come back).

However, a lot of people genuinely think what they list is good (just watch an
episode of a talent show audition and see how surprised people get when you
tell them they are shit).

So you'll still get loads of people submitting, but you'll have the added
time-sink of dealing with those people who thought they were good enough, lost
the $10 and now opened a case against you on PayPal.

My advice would be (if you're going down the charge route) to simply charge
everyone for submission and don't give the money back whether they make it or
not.

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aytekin
They could have just hired someone with a little design sense at oDesk. A
designer from Philippines would have probably cost them like $5/hour. All they
would have to do is approve the selections already made by the review guy(s).

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josscrowcroft
Then they wouldn't make any money - which is I feel the subtext of this blog
post...

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rralian
I say just keep the money. It's a reasonable deterrent for junk. And if you're
doing a ton of refunds on paypal (or any other payment service presumably),
you will eventually get banned.

