People with Asian credit cards, g'd luck with membership.

<rant on>

Well, I sent a cashier's check for my membership, but due to post

office error, it was returned. In the intervening weeks, photo.net

went from accepting this form of payment, to claiming that it was "too

much trouble" or some nonsense. As someone who has lived in the U.S.

for nearly 20 years, and who has taken international payments, I

assure you that a US$ denomination cashier's check from Taiwan is as

good as a cashier's check from the U.S., costs the same to process

(free, just sign it and deposit it), and is much LESS trouble than a

personal check from the U.S. (cashier's checks don't bounce).

 

Paypal will not process credit cards, mainly due to the fact that they

can not instantly verify the account (Chinese names are backwards,

family name is first).

 

I give up. I will still post a few shots now and again, but the

limits on non-subscribers make the site of limited use to me. You guys

have the potential for a great site, in fact, HAVE a great site that

still has a LOT of potential.

 

Sump'n to think about, one of my folders with 8 generated in the

neighborhood of 150,000 views in its first two weeks. IF advertising

revenue is paying 75% of the bills, think of how many ads would have

been generated if that folder had, say, 50 shots ('round a million, I

believe...that's a lot o' ad displays).

 

I'll still be around, and if, in the future, there is a way for me to

subscribe, I will. However, as one who has had on-line businesses, I

assure you that CC processing is neither expensive nor difficult.

<rant off>

 

Anyway, you guys seem to have had your hands full recently with DB

failures, keep up the good work, I do appreciate it. The non-photo

critique forums are still quite useful, and I try and contribute

actual *useful* information where I can (so many people know much more

than me that envariably, SOMEONE beats me to it :D).

Errr, let me clarify...Paypal will not process credit cards from Taiwan, and I assume China or from just about any other place whose native language is not in a romanized alphabet :). Oh, same CC works just fine at Amazon.com :).

It is true that some forms of international payments are no harder to process than a US Post Office money order. However, researching and explaining to people exactly what they have to do, country by country, is really not possible and not worth the few extra dollars we would get from the people who would do it right. Also, I don't know that much about this myself, and can't tell by looking whether a check is easy or hard to process. I have had the experience on several occasions of having the bank charge us more for processing a payment from overseas than the amount of the check.

A cashier's check or bank draft from any known international bank (in Taiwan, ICBC and Chinatrust come to mind, there are also branches of HSBC, Credit Suisse, and Bank of America in the larger cities) deposits just fine (old bid'ness had a lot of customers in Asia and Europe, in the year and a half before it closed, we took a dozen or more payments from outside the U.S., always specifying bank draft or cashier's check). Personally, I wouldn't mind paying a higher fee to offset the trouble. However, I ended up spending close to 45 minutes with Paypal trying to figure out if the problem was with how I was entering a Chinese name. What was also frustrating is that I was faced with having a bank draft that I endedd up just tearing up because after it was returned because of a local post office error, the policy had changed (so, no matter what...it is gonna cost me $50 for my first year at photo.net if I can figure out a way to get the money through Paypal...btw, when I had imperialtreasures.com, that was the ONLY form of payment we didn't accept-Paypal...too much trouble).

 

If I were to send you guys a bank draft for US$100 for three years, would THAT offset the cost?