instructed by Toni MacAskill, to go take a running jump

mango8

i'm a long term non us based smugmug fan with both pro and power account (100,000 images hosted) that need renewing - but due to date theft and abusing of my accounts i no longer have a credit card. And we dont have prepaid cards that can be used online where i live.
So i sort advice and help from billing only to receive an email from Toni say tough shit nothing i can do for you...
Stunned was how i felt after being told by the owners mother that essentially 'Hey we're so big that we dont care'.
Smugmug is a wonderful site, but it's a global community and many of your current and potential future customers are non US based - which makes amazon payments useless - so while Paypal is far from perfect it does offer an alternate method of payment. Or open an extra bank account which accepts bank transfers and assign a reference no. to each renewal which can be quoted on the TT - not difficult. Any accounts program can handle it. Simple ways to increase Smugmug revenue. Telling a long term customer who wants to pay you money that you are not interested in him paying you is the first step on a slippery slope down which i would hate to see smugmug go

Andy

Hi, I'm sorry for this, let me dig into the help ticket and I'll be back to you here shortly. This is definitely not how we want you to feel! I'm on it.

Andy

Hi Simon, I'm sorry you are upset. I've read through the entire email correspondence trail with you and Toni. It's true, we don't have any other way to accept payment other than credit cards (for all customers), or Amazon Payments (for US customers). We are working to get Paypal integrated for payments but it's going to take us a little while.

But not once in the email trail did Toni say the words you posted above - so while you are upset about this, let's not make this into something that it is not. Toni gave you very clear, very polite answers. I realize these answers do not make you happy. But in no way are we ungrateful for your business.

I'm going to reply to your email and get you fixed up - I have a solution that will work for now.

mango8

Hi Andy, Thank you for addressing the problem so promptly. You don't have to say the actual words to convey a tone and message and that was the vibe, feel and tone of Toni's email replies which carry a lot of weight given her surname and position. The same comments said for example by a checkout clerk at a multi-national retail chain would convey something completely different. That you have a work around says i'm not the first to encounter the problem and it's good to hear that you're going to incorporate other payment methods. Cudos and thanks to the Smugmug team for offering such a solid product.