While I have still yet to write the long overdue post, I have moved from my NYC apartment to the west coast, California, specifically. With this, I terminated my ConEd account. Now, in the process of setting up my account I had hooked direct pay up to a bank account I almost never put money in and it just turned out that balance in that account was not enough to clear my last ConEd Payment.
This translate to me having to pay with a check card or mail in a check. While mailing in a check would have been cheaper, it requires more of my time and a little more effort than I wanted to exert, so I decided to pay the $4.95 fee to pay by phone.
I call in over the weekend, and after entering my card number twice, I hear that the payment system does not believe my card to be a valid number.
So I call in again this morning, same thing.
Finally get myself to a representative after 30 MINUTES of holding only to find out that they DO NOT ACCEPT VISA!!! No wonder my card wasn’t working, it was a Visa card. Mind you, there was no warning of this over the phone.
Bottom line, I finally ended up paying my bill with a Mastercard and everything worked out, but I have two comments:
One, why would a company like ConEd not accept Visa, but accept Mastercard and Discover? This is stupid, if you are provider of any product, whether it be software or a serivce, you should make it as easy as possible to for people to pay you. Visa is a very popular card, you should accept it.
Two, if for some RIDICULOUSLY STUPID reason, you find yourself in a position to not accept a standard card (/protocol/whatever) you should explain to your user that you that it is not accepted, instead of making them wait. I could have payed with a Mastercard over the automated system, if they had just let me know. Communicate with your users, it is the best way to make them happy.