audrabianca wrote:depressing yes. That 11 day freeze almost eliminated the chances of my New Year article selling.
I hear you, Audra. This is why CC needs to implement something like:
1. Buyers get an automatic reminder email after 2 days if they put articles in their cart and hadn't paid for it. The email can say something like the articles they put in their cart will be released for other buyers within 24 hours or so.
2. Expire a cart after 3 days if the buyer hasn't paid, automatically releasing the articles back to the pool. (Just like how it is for articles submitted for public requests.)
3. Change the "waiting" status we see on our articles to something more descriptive: "In cart" (for articles in cart but not paid yet) and "In process" (for articles whose payments are waiting to clear) -- so we aren't left in the dark or we don't end up contacting support all the time and wondering why it's taking so long.
Articles shouldn't be removed just because someone puts it in his cart and doesn't pay! Sure, if the customer pays, even by eCheck, fine. But until the order is finalized by entering payment information, the article should be available for someone else to buy. I understand a short holding period, say 20-40 minutes, so that the customer has time to browse, add other articles, and then pay, but 11 days?
Besides, if a writer wanted to be mischeivious, I suppose it's possible to put a competitor's articles into a bogus cart. . .
Celeste, maybe you were confused. the 11 days was how long the article sat in the "waiting" status. I much prefer this problem to the time 35 of my articles were stolen in one day with bogus paypal info. So placing the emphasis on entering payment information in addition to dropping articles in the shopping cart before the articles become unavailable to other buyers presents a different can of worms.
The part of the mischievous writer had occurred to me. But if a writer would do that to outsell the competition, they would also likely be posting chunks of our articles on other sites. Either way, we are unable to sell an article for full rights when it sits in a shopping cart or gets posted somewhere. I hope our colleagues have higher ethics than that.
There is no easy way like CC has alluded to before to keep the site open for all potential buyers and prevent these problems. If we had a Sam's Club of sorts, CC would have to be confident in revenue from people who went through a few more steps of membership to see content. People still try to steal from wholesale clubs.
Last edited by audrabianca on Sat Jan 09, 2010 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Celeste Stewart wrote:Articles shouldn't be removed just because someone puts it in his cart and doesn't pay! Sure, if the customer pays, even by eCheck, fine. But until the order is finalized by entering payment information, the article should be available for someone else to buy. I understand a short holding period, say 20-40 minutes, so that the customer has time to browse, add other articles, and then pay, but 11 days?
Besides, if a writer wanted to be mischeivious, I suppose it's possible to put a competitor's articles into a bogus cart. . .
Articles being available for other buyers even if they are already in someone else's cart is a much better idea, Celeste, although I'm thinking it may cause multiple purchase of an article by different buyers at the same time. It's great if they all buy usage, but what for unique or full rights? One workaround I can think of is to put something like, "The Article Title has been purchased by another buyer since you put it in your cart so it has been removed." on a buyer's cart while he is shopping and adding articles.
It's really disappointing to have articles unavailable for 11 days. Frankly, it wasn't a good start for me.
The frustration builds on already having a slow couple months here. If I had a solution to sell more articles, I would be doing it. but I've been writing a lot of articles about window treatments and other random stuff lately to make up for this. I have window treatments so stuck on the brain that I decided to submit one here.
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Last edited by audrabianca on Sat Jan 09, 2010 4:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
No, I'm not confused. If a customer put the articles in the cart 11 days ago (thus the "waiting" status) and never entered any sort of payment, then that's ridiculous that the articles were automatically put into limbo for that long - or however long it takes for someone to manually release them. A 20-40 minute holding period to allow legitimate customers to complete their orders is reasonable, but abandoned orders (those where no payment has never been entered) shouldn't automatically remove articles from being available to other customers.
I agree. We were trying to comply with David's request for patience on day 11. but then there are thousands of writers here and many more thousands of articles, so we must put one article into perspective.
Nichewriter, I agree that articles should be removed temporarily so that the customer can complete the transaction and multiple customers cannot buy the same article at the same time. I just don't think that the hold should extend indefinitely. Some sort of mechanism should be put into place that promptly releases abandoned orders.
Yeah, we've all been patient. I, too, had one of those waiting articles and waited patiently for it to either clear or revert back to being available. Now that we know a legitimite customer apparently did not send an eCheck, it's time to brainstorm ideas so that this doesn't continue to happen. Abandoned orders are common all over the Internet, so I imagine shopping cart systems must have some sort of setting that can be tweaked to deal with releasing inventory.
I've given my suggestions in this thread and in past threads for dealing with this waiting status thing. Right now, just about any solution that minimizes, if not eliminates, the length of time our articles are stuck in limbo is good to me! I have been so bummed out about this issue that I've decided to step back from submitting further articles until I'm ready again.
I would love if we could brainstorm online with CC but there are degrees of separation here. I felt that way after a lot of my articles were stolen, but it wasn't a busy month. I think even if I uploaded 200 articles right now, they wouldn't sell fast. The market is just not hot lately, and we are sharing sales with lots of writers.
It's the weekend, so Support's not likely to hear our ideas for a couple of days. . . In the meantime, hopefully you'll feel better about this as time goes by and new ideas imiplemented.
But if a writer would do that to outsell the competition, they would also likely be posting chunks of our articles on other sites. Either way, we are unable to sell an article for full rights when it sits in a shopping cart or gets posted somewhere. I hope our colleagues have higher ethics than that.