Ecommerce Developer Shopify.com Waits Two Years to Collect My $1.51

I'm not one to nickel and dime my clients. That's partly because that backstabbing, two-faced, cowardly Thomas Jefferson appears on the face of the nickel and I want nothing to do with him. But it's mostly because it wastes my time and it's just not worth it. South Island Design bills its clients quarterly for most web site maintenance. To do it weekly, or even monthly, would be a chore of sending out a bunch of invoices for $15 or $20. So it came as a bit of a disappointment when I received my last credit card statement with a charge from Shopify.com for $1.51.

Two years ago South Island Design used Shopify to create an e-commerce site for the Ybor City Museum Society, a Tampa-based non-profit organization. Due to various reasons the store was live for about one day and the only transactions that ever took place were tests. Paypal didn't like the idea of selling tobacco products and closed the account. The Shopify store was also closed until an alternative payment processor could be implemented.

So why would a company wait two years to invoice me for some test transactions? Mike Rochon from the Shopify support staff explains the charges as follows (original post):

"Hello,
These charges were held over from when your store was active. We used to not charge invoices until the sum total of the orders was greater than $5, however we recently ran a clean-up job to process old orders that had never been processed due to this. The orders they pertain to can be viewed in your Account area.
Best regards, Mike @ Shopify"

(I do have to thank Mike for the quick reply. I really wasn't expecting to hear back until maybe 2012.)

I'm sure Shopify's terms of service completely allows them to do this. And I'm more than happy to pay whatever charges I incurred while using their service.

I'm just wondering why after two years $1.51 is suddenly worth it. What changed that less than $5.00 wasn't worth the effort and now it is? Admittedly $1.51 x 500+ other stores in the same situation is a lot of change to find buried in your sofa, but that's assuming no one is still sitting on the sofa. And what if that credit card number were no longer valid. Were they going to make the extra effort to contact me and collect on this handful of change?

Shopify could have contacted me to ask why the shopping cart wasn't in use. Was there a problem with the service? How could we make it better? And by the way, you know you have $1.51 in test transactions we haven't yet billed, don't you?

This could have been the perfect opportunity to reach out to 500+ old customers and get them to sign up for one of the monthly payment plans starting at $24.00. Instead it's a petty charge on my credit card that leaves me second-guessing my opinion of Shopify. It's the sort of thing I would have expected from that no good Thomas Jefferson if he had a merchant account, the internet and the smarts to develop a slick, little e-commerce platform when he wasn't running from the Redcoats.

And that's the disappointing part of this. Shopify has a great service. South Island Design was able to develop a custom designed shopping cart rather quickly and easily. And better yet, the client was also able to administer the backend and start uploading products almost immediately.*

I could get on my high horse and threaten them with "$1.51! You don't know who you've messed with! I'll never use Shopify again!" I probably won't, but that's not always for me to decide. Every client has different needs and the Ybor City Museum Society may call tomorrow ready to re-open their store. I'd also bet that after two years of inactivity, Shopify has already written me off (but apparently not my out-of-date credit card).

So Shopify can have my stack of nickels and a single penny. I made those test transactions two years ago and they're entitled to that money. But was it really worth it?

07/05/09

*The one feature that initially drew us to Shopify was the pricing. Shopify only charged a transaction fee which was a percentage of the sale. This is perfect for a new site that's slow to build traffic. However, soon after we finished development of the Ybor City Museum Society's site, Shopify implemented without warning monthly plans plus transaction fees. The lesson to be learned here: Stick to Open Source.