Which currency is losing out?

We are a UK company so all our accounting is done in Pounds Sterling, and therefore we use that as the base, we will regularly review the pricing in US dollars to make sure it is as close to the UK exchange rate as possible. At this time there is no way to swap between currencies other then moving countries, which is a tad extreme, we may well allow you to change the currency at some point in the future.

Imagine this typical scenario:

Joe buys YM and installs it on the version of WordPress created for him by his Hosting Provider, he signs up to PayPal and pays his fees for pro and enables the gateway. Everything is fine, until customers start complaining they are being charged repeatedly for the same transaction. Joe is now left with several major problems, and being threatened with legal action, words like PCI DSS compliance are bounced around and so he logically assumes its a bug with the software and in turns threatens NewMedias with legal action, only problem the issue was never with Your Members it was down to the shared hosts setting up of CURL.

Running credit card processing is not a process to do lightly, in addition to the mountain of paperwork the technical implementation both in the storing but also the calling of the card company has to be rock solid, this is not something NewMedias has any control over. We can’t hold every customers hand and check every hosting provider or indeed even look over PCI scans and documentation, yet we would be in part taking on risk associated with users carrying out credit card transactions. Now risk can be mitigated and our indemnity insurance would cover such events, but most people take out based on the cost of their business we would have to increase ours to match our biggest clients, some of our customers have 10s of thousands of users and are bringing in scary figures.

People asking for Credit Card Processing are:

• Non technical people who when we explain the process they would need to go through often back away quickly, suddenly PayPal is great
• Technical People, these are often the people who dismiss PCI-DSS compliance as easy, and in truth if you are in complete control of the entire system it is, just another pile of paperwork to do. However these people are also our most expensive customers, there support requirements are higher, normally needing a developer to engage with them, and the chances of tinkering is higher. Making them the highest risk people when it comes to Credit Card Gateway they are the group most likely to have a problem, and be the first to throw blame. A little knowledge is normally a dangerous thing.
• Developers, these true out and out devs are more then capable of building a gateway and we encourage them to do so, they nearly always have control of their environment we encourage and support them, in development, because we know that by them doing the work, our liability is virtually non existant. If a developer was to do a PayPal pro gateway and ask us to promote it? Well we will cross that bridge if it happens

While for us economics means we do not support direct Credit Card gateways, it is as much to protect our user base, people will rarely understand the complications or the liability involved with taking payments in this manner, it is not for us to police them, and we have yet to find a feasible model where we can support them without significant cost to ourselves, which would be virtually impossible to pass on to the user.

Is all lost?

Not at all we are working on new ways to make payments, one of the most exciting is our work with Coding Futures to build a new payment gateway based on PayPal Digital Goods meaning you will never have to leave the page to make payment for posts or subscriptions.

For me this is exciting new way (which also allows credit card payments) will at least bring people a little closer to not having to deal with ugly and unintuitive UI of PayPal and similar providers.

New Navigation

It’s the time myself and Glenn dread we are going to have to go through and redo all the screenshots! Your Members has had a new interface design, all the screens are still there but now, the main menu, is part of the sidebar menu, and the sub pages are at the top. This should make things, cleaner and easier, we have also added a quick method to getting to the support forums!

The new menu system should make navigation easier, and because we no longer need to rely on sukerfish, reduce filesize and page load on the admin section!
To that end, we have removed the old NewMedias nav bar at the botto, very few people were using it, and by removing it we have once more increase page load speeds.

New Version Control

The version control which has sat on the front page, is now gone, replaced by a prompt which shows on all YM pages when a new version is available.

New Front Page

The front page has had a complete overhaul, to make it useful and functional, as you enter the front page, you are able to see sales, subscription, member information giving you quick access and visual references to your transaction log. Now you will be able to see quickly how sales are doing over the month, also we have reduced down the number of calls to our servers to just pulling the news feed, meaning the new front page will load quickly. One sad thing, the old logo has now gone, taken up with the graph instead.

Other new features

Ability to email, non reoccurring users, prior to their subscription running out, new internal cron manager, some interesting new drip features, host of new bits and pieces to Pay per Post. Dozens of bug fixes, a radical overhaul of the IPN for Paypal to stop those annoying multiple notifications.

Your Secure Stream

Before I forget don’t forget to check out Your Secure Stream for Your Members when next looking for video protection via Amazon s3.