How I lost my first customer twice.
TL;DR: I failed to charge my customers on launch day and a week after cuz I'm a cheap ass.
Since I've launched nocodery the objective was to prove that a no-code job board could be profitable.
I had already proven that before launch but not from the main revenue channel, through ads.
So, on launch day I was expecting to have at least 1 sale but with more than 1000 visits and 30+ clicks on the "post a job" button something should be wrong.
And it was, cognito forms don't accept payments unless they're installed with the iframe, which I didn't.
Changing providers I didn't want to pay for an expensive typeform license so I tried formspree. It has stripe, integrates with my forms, tested with a test cc number and it worked.
Now I just had to wait.
A couple of days later an email comes in with a response to the form and I was thrilled until I found out that the stripe was on testing all along and I needed to pay for the integration, ok $12 seems fair since I'm going to get $29 from the sale.
Paid the form, email the client that had failed explain the situation and asking them to try again and waited.
24h later another email with another error from the se person and this time I got an email from the person complaining, ofc.
So after some digging I've found out that the stripe form needs and email field in orther to process the payment.
Lessons learned:
Always test your critical integrations, that might mean make it or break it.
Don't always go for the cheapest option, it might cost you your precious time.
P.s. I've emailed the client a 3rd time and dropped the pricing to $9.90 just to punish myself 😂
Formspree founder here. I'm really sorry to hear this. Here's what we're doing to try to correct it:
Again sorry you lost your first customer. Thanks for this post which will definitely help us improve our Stripe integration.
This is really unexpected but thanks a lot for the upgrade it's going to help us a lot to keep bootstraping.
About the customer I got lucky, he came a 3rd time and the payment got through 🙌
Let me know if you need help to review any new stuff regarding payments on formspree.
Also, Great customer support.
You can title it lost my first customer twice 😝
Done
If you don't write unit/integration tests for your app, AT LEAST test out the most important part of your app: payments!
There's nothing that you can refine and polish more than your payments page. These people have gone through the entire gauntlet of finding you, signing up, using your product, deciding to pay, and clicking the pay button. They're the ones most likely to end up paying you.
Aside from paying customers, the people who should get your fullest attention are your active users.
True that
Good news, third time was a charm, I didn't lose the customer after all, lucky me.
Had similar teething issues in our signup process for Transporters.io years ago.
Worked fine in tests but real signups hit various issues.
I setup 2 emails to myself on every signup, 1 at very start of process, another right at the end.
Still in place 4 years later, occasionally I only get 1 email and know to dig in and check.
Yea, always test. Should order from yourself before launching, you can refund yourself or just pay the commission. Or better have another person do a test order and pay him back.
That way could also test refunds...
I never thought about the refunds 🤦
Some people abuse new business, buy big, stress you for a PayPal refund (since you can't refund properly) and after do a charge back, so they double their money
Not sure how common, but I read stories.
Damn