GAE BILLING IS SERIOUSLY MESSED UP

[James Gilliam]

My BILLING ID is 4517-8352-4265

Gae billing sent me email saying my checking account didn't clear and returned no status for the Aug 1st bill.  It has been working for months.

Called bank, they said the latest request was never presented to them -- probably the reason no status was returned, eh ?

Over the next week, submitted one time payments for the checking account, four debit and/or credit cards.

Nothing is clearing.

Submitted another debit card from a different bank, shows pending only.

The debit cards show they are pending in the account, then they disappear.  The bank said Google billing is not completing the transactions.

Sent two emails to cloud-...@google.com -- no response.

Anybody from billing out there ?

[James Gilliam]

Was told to go to the following link to report billing errors ---

https://support.google.com/code/bin/request.py?contact_type=cloud_platform_billing

It wants to know the ORDER ID ...

There is no ORDER ID on the GAE DASHBOARD anywhere I can find.

Exactly how am I to fill out a form that wants an ORDER ID and there is no ORDER ID?

GAE -- nobody to call or to contact even when there is a serious problem.

[Rae Wang]

James, the order ID is not a required field. Can you leave it empty and submit the support request? 

[Joakim]

The ORDER ID field is not marked as mandatory. Even if it was, you could just enter N/A.

The only time I've had reason to use that form, my issue was responded to within 2 days, and from that point they were very quick to reply to the following emails. I was not disappointed.

[James Gilliam]

Thanks for pointing that out.

I didn't notice that it was not required.

I am so frustrated dealing with GAE and GOOGLE as well.

There is nobody to call even when there is a serious problem.

Instead, FAQ and FORMS and frequently ... NO RESPONSE.

I did get a response on the forum saying not to report billing issues.

Why can't we get a way on the GAE DASHBOARD to report billing issues?

On Tuesday, August 13, 2013 12:21:34 PM UTC-7, James Gilliam wrote:

[Rae Wang]

I understand your frustration. We want to balance making it easy to report issues with protecting your information and not crowding GAE dashboard. We can look into if there are ways to make the support form more easily accessible. 

Now you have submitted the support request, our support team should be able to help you soon. Reply if you still don't hear back in the next few days.

[James Gilliam]

The saga of a broken billing system continues ...

A few days ago, I setup another checking account GAE billing; an account with Chase Bank (largest US bank I believe); the account has existed for 10 years and used every day.  I received a GAE BILLING decline this morning ...

We were unable to place a small test deposit in your bank account. This may have happened for several reasons: 

1. Your bank account information was entered incorrectly.
2. Your bank account no longer exists.
3. Your bank account has a restriction against direct debiting.

None of this is true.

I suggest a fourth possibility ...

4. The GAE BILLING system is seriously broken and this failure is a GAE BILLING problem.  Try and let somebody know but you will notice there is no hint in this email has to go about doing that.  Perhaps, you could post something on a public forum to get your private billing issue resolve.  Or, maybe, just wait until GAE disables your account because you are unable to make a regular payment with the payment system.  At that point, you will have little choice except to sue somebody.

I made a couple more one time payments using different methods of payment.

On Tuesday, August 13, 2013 12:21:34 PM UTC-7, James Gilliam wrote:

[Brian Retford]

Hey James,

Apologies you're having so much difficulty with the payment systems. We're hard at work on multiple fronts to improve the user experience in that area.

I took a quick look at your account and most of your forms of payment seem correctly setup, though one bank account appears to be declining our attempts to send test deposits. Hopefully our support people have been in contact to explain that (does the UI make it reasonably clear that this is what's going on?). It appears that we're actually getting rejections from the bank when attempting to do test deposits (and that we're actually communicating with the bank's gateway). I'll also point out, in what's hopefully reassurring, that GAE now shares the same billing backend as adwords, and that, in general, we haven't ran into very many system caused FoP decline issues.

I'd also like to point out that the system will automatically attempt to charge your fallback options - you don't need to make manual payments.

[Jim Gilliam]

Brian,

The UI is good.  The problem is that transactions are not completing.

When the first ACH debit to my checking account was declined on August 8th, after working for months, I called the bank.  They told me that no such ACH debit was presented to them and they declined nothing.  The message from GOOGLE said that no reason was given by the bank.  The bank said they always give a reason for any decline.  And since GOOGLE did not have a reason for the decline, I believe this means that GOOGLE has a serious glitch in their system.

After this, I then initiated manual payments using a DEBIT card; in fact, several different DEBIT and CREDIT cards.  I quickly discovered these transactions would stay pending for a few days and then disappear.  The bank indicated that GOOGLE initiated the transaction, putting the money on hold and the transaction in PENDING state; however, the bank said, GOOGLE never sent the finalized transaction so the pending disappeared and the money was released back into the account.

Right now, I am desperately trying to get a transaction to complete so that my GAE account has a credit.  I believe eventually the GOOGLE system will figure out that these transaction did not complete properly and disable my GAE account.  That would be a very serious issue for me and my clients.

Thanks

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[Jeff Schnitzer]

FWIW, we just got the "your credit card was declined" message from GAE even though there is nothing wrong with our card.

Submitted a complaint to the billing form.

Something is broken.

Jeff

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[Ken Bowen]

I also got
"couldn't process a payment with your Visa…...for $0.02 on Aug 4, 2013".

It's a Citicard that has been on the GAE account for many months (and the card has be in continual use for over 10 years). I only got the email yesterday (8/15). I called Citibank. They checked and stated that the charge was presented on Aug 3, and that it was approved, and there were no presentations or transactions showing on the 4th.

I managed to fix it by going to Billing > Billing Settings, and clicking the Edit next to the Primary (and only form of payment), then clicking OK, and then clicking "Activate this …" (or whatever it actually said.) In 5-10 minutes, the Billing Settings and Billing Status pages looked correct, and I was able to make a manual payment (for 0.03) which showed on Billing Transactions.

So I got over it. But this is NOT that way an organization which claims to be world-class should treat it's customers.

I can't prove it, but I believe that my setup for running our GAE app off a custom domain was broken by this. But I'll post that separately.

--Ken

[Rae Wang]

Thank you for bringing these issues to our attention. We are seeing a number of payment failures on GAE accounts recently and are actively investigating issues on our side. Sorry about the inconvenience it has caused you. We are working on resolving the issues. 

[Rae Wang]

Update: Our billing team has found the issue and fixed it. New charges should succeed now. Our engineers are looking into retrying/recovering the failed ones. As usual, your feedback on the forum is helping us to improve our system. We really appreciate it. Thank you.

[Gilberto Torrezan Filho]

I just received an e-mail of failed payment today, for the second time in one week. There's nothing wrong with my card, according to my bank (I even received a SMS about the payment to GAE - I receive a SMS everytime the card is used).

I reenabled the card waiting for it to succeed. Let's see what happens.

My theory: you guys just merged the code from Google Wallet you tested at Google I/O 2013 registration to the app engine billing system, corrupting any form of payment =P

Jokes aside, this kind of issue is really critical. What's the use of multiple datacenters, with high replication datastore, with high availability and so on... if everything goes down due to lack of payment?

[Theodore Book]

I'm experiencing the same thing.  Just submitted the form.  We'll see what happens.

[Brandon Thomson]

Anyone know if there's a way to check in the control panel if we're now in the clear billing-wise?

Under Usage History I have a "Charge Failed" followed by "Billing Setup Successful" a couple days later (I'm assuming that was somebody at Google, since it wasn't me).

Basically I want to make sure our service isn't going to get shut off in 30 days.

[Rae Wang]

I confirmed with our billing engineers, new payments should go through successfully now. Some older failures are still trickling back in from the system - resulting in the emails. They will retry the failures in the next couple of days to clear the failure status. Your service won't be shut off in 30 days. If you continue to receive failure messages after the next couple of days, please file a support ticket (https://support.google.com/code/bin/request.py?contact_type=cloud_platform_billing). 

[Damith C Rajapakse]

Good to hear that. Hope it gets sorted out soon.

I received 'payment declined' notice 3 times in the last 3 weeks (the latest was yesterday). Re-enabled the card each time.