SkyVerge

We use the Global Payments plugin to process website payments. It took Skyverge 8 hours just to send an automated reply saying theyd received our support request. This was last Thursday, it is now Monday and we have still not heard from their support team. From past experience, when we do eventually hear from their support, each time they ask a question, it will take many hours after we reply before we hear from them again. Dreadful service.

I've been using WooCommerce and their authorize.net plugin from Skyverge for a few years. Starting in February, one of their updates broke my site, to the point that customers could not even make simple single-pay purchases for downloadable items...literally the simplest thing one could imagine for an ecommerce system. Heck, we could do that back in 1995! So far it's cost my company well over $10,000 from one nasty bug that they won't fix; the total lost revenue is much greater, but due to enormous effort and expense from me and extra staff I hired to individually contact every customer with a failed payment, we've managed to recoup some (but not nearly all) of the lost revenue. Not a sustainable solution!! And it couldn't come at a worse time; like many businesses, I'm impacted on both the supply and demand side by the COVID19 pandemic. Ever since I've been back and forth with support, first at Woo and then Skyverge. Skyverge has been beyond worthless, doing nothing but make me incredibly frustrated...their last response was to send me back to Woo support! These people are complete idiots all around; Woo support is pretty bad, but Skyverge is an absolute nightmare. Not only have they wasted my time and totally failed to solve the problem, but they are just sending me cut-n-paste responses to run me in circles. Clearly their support techs are trained to frustrate people in the hope they go away so they don't need to provide any further support. Just a couple examples: #1 They asked me to setup an admin account to login to my system. Sure, no problem...pretty standard for support debugging an issue. I followed all of their instructions, exactly, and promptly provided them the login. I even supplied a screenshot showing their account in the WP backend, with their email address in clear view. What's their response? Well, first they sat on it for several days. Then, the response I got was "We don't know what email to use to login." Really?! I used THEIR INSTRUCTIONS, and I sent them a dang screenshot clearly showing the email address for their account. Seriously? It seems they had no intent to ever actually login to my system; perhaps they think that if they can provide an extremely confusing process, the customers will think it is their fault they are doing it wrong and go away. Not me...I haven't done tech full time in over 20 years, but I've got a wall full of computer science degrees from MIT (yes, really!), so I'm not easily deterred by their attempts to get rid of me with confusing instructions and tech speak. #2 They keep telling me that the bugs are my fault because I haven't updated my software. (Another ploy to minimize their support burden!) Yes of course everything is updated...I always check that first before even opening a ticket. I sent them screenshots showing that everything was updated. They said "oh no, you need to connect your site to Woo, then you'll get all the real updates". Total nonsense! "real updates"? My site has been connected to Woo; I sent more screenshots to show them that I had already done everything they asked in terms of updates, connections, subscriptions, etc. My only recourse now is to hire a third party tech (at significant expense - I was quoted $3000 to fix this, which will also be a nightmare in the future when the next update breaks the fix.) And I have to start the expensive, gigantic headache of switching my whole business to use a different ecommerce solution in the future. AVOID AT ALL COSTS!! You might get lucky and stuff may work for a while, but it's just a matter of time until a bad update wipes out your system, and then you'll totally screwed because their support is incompetent. I expect this kind of support nightmare from the cable company with a monopoly, but not from a software company where customers have options.

I’m a website developer, which means that I help clients with technical enhancements to their websites. I had a client who needed online checkout for his website, which is something I have done many times over the years. Once you understand how it works, it’s simple enough. The client decided on a new website, as the one he was using was pretty old. I suggested a Wordpress site. I have a lot of experience with Wordpress, and the websites have turned out well. However, I decided to use Woocommerce for that part of the site. I installed it plugin with no problems, and tested it thoroughly as a dev site. Since he is a Bank of America user, I contacted them for information; they contacted my client, and things were going smoothly. Since this was a Woocommerce site, I looked to see how to make the connection between Woocommerce and the bank. I was surprised to learn that one had to purchase a plugin. I suppose I could have developed my own plugin, but it really wasn’t in my client’s budget, so I decided to buy it, as it would probably save me some time. The way this works is this: 1. The bank is Bank of America. 2. The payment gateway is First Data. 3. The software provider is SkyVerge. So SkyVerge is the software provider. So I purchased the plugin SkyVerge, got the codes from the bank, and tested the site. Everything was good. I started the transfer from the dev site to the live site at about 4am. I don’t like down websites, so if there is a chance of that, I move them early in the morning. Everything went smoothly. The website worked as expected on the new server. Then I tried to place a live order, and the problems began. The first problem was that the checkout plugin was reporting “Sorry, it seems that there are no available payment methods for your state.” By this time, it was about 7 am. I had spent some time trying to track down the problem, without finding anything. So I thought to myself “Well, OK. Some setting is wrong. I’ll just contact support.” As part of the support reporting system, you need to fill out a form, including a Status Report which is generated by Woocommerce. When you submit the form, it will tell you whether anything is lacking on the site. In my case, it said I was using an outdated version of the SkyVerge software. (It has been updated three days before.) But when I went to update it, I got an error “First Data 4.0 Not Available for Wordpress 4.5.1”. So I contacted support, laying the entire problem out for them, including the “no available payment methods” error. Finally, around 4 pm, I received an answer, suggesting that he was able to run the plugin just fine, and maybe I should use a dev site for testing. Of course, I had used a dev site for testing, but it revealed no issues. I replied again, but received no further response that day. The next day (Saturday) I did receive a response, saying that I was only allowed to use a single copy of the plugin, and that I had to disable it on my dev site (which I still had) and then reenable it on the live site. It may be that this is a common practice among sellers of Woocommerce plugings, but I’ve bought a few plugins in my time, and never ran into it before. I can see why they do it, but it should be mentioned somewhere, and the “First Data Not Available for Wordpress 4.5.1” error was clearly erroneous. In any case, I did as he suggested, the update was complete, but I still had the “no available payment methods” error. I reported that to the support guy, but received no further reply that day. On Monday, I was expecting a reply, but received nothing, so I submitted another ticket. By this time, I’m wondering what continent SkyVerge is on. SkyVerge has a New York mailing address, but they are easy to come by. Their address is at 228 Park Ave S, which hosts a “Virtual Address” company. They say they are in CET time (which would be GMT +1), so western Europe. But I have doubts. I have received a couple of responses today. They are always well written responses, and they sound helpful and polite, but they haven’t yet dealt with the problem. Frankly, I’m appalled. If I knew it would take this long, I would have saved my money, and written it myself. I am sure the answer to this problem exists, and is fairly simple. But so far, I have not been able to extract it from the support people at SkyVerge. So my advice to be very careful. 1. Don’t use Bank of America 2. Don’t use WooThemes Woocommerce. 3. Don’t use First Data 4. Don’t use SkyVerge s