Yahoo's Overture System Auto-Charges Credit Cards Incorrectly

[grnidone]

How can this happen? Very easily. Let’s say you are an agency and you put all of your customer’s accounts under your own login for ease of use. Your customers still have access to only their account with their own login. It is not uncommon for an agency to take over PPC from their client, and in that case, there might be a credit card still on file under the customer’s login. And, as an agency, it is also not uncommon to have many credit cards under the agency login for different accounts.

If the credit card under the Client account expires, Overture’s system will automatically go to the Agency account and use the first credit card listed in the Agency account regardless of if it is the credit card that belongs to that client or not. The change in credit card happens without any notification to either the customer or the agency.

The fix can be simple. Just put the default in the drop down credit card box as "Choose Credit Card". I blogged about it on my blog where I can insert pictures to show the two minute fix it would take to keep this from happening again. I've told Overture about this several times, but I'm always told "we'll look into it" and then nothing happens.

I find it amazing that as long as Overture has been in the PPC business their agency user interface isn't more robust.

Has anyone else had this issue happen to them? Or am I the only one?

<edit> I just realized I put this in the wrong category...it should be in the PPC category..can someone please move?</edit>

[rozovichak]

This sounds like it would make anyone's blood boil - something so simple to prevent and yet, nothing gets done about it . This must get quite time consuming - having to sort out other people's finances...

I haven't had that problem, but they try and charge my account via credit card each and every month, even though i pay via wire transfer and have been for years...

[grnidone]

It seems to me that Overture (OK Yahoo) has the attitude: "People have to come to us anyway, so we can have a crappy interface if we want to. We don't need to have good customer service...we're the biggest fish."

[rozovichak]

I have to say that I get a different feeling depending on which department I deal with. Some of the guys at Yahoo! are really professional and good to work with, but there are a few other areas, where the attitude is a lot less than caring . It is very frustrating and sometimes you just want to pick up your bags and go, but then you remember that they ARE a big fish...