<Glazblog/>

I have been using e-junkie for my sales of BlueGriffon add-ons and BlueGriffon EPUB Edition for years. Quite happily until recently. But this changed and I am now extremely upset by the way e-junkie dealt with the recent changes in VAT in the European Union.

Until the 31st of december 2014, using them to sell a downloadable product world-wide from a business inside the EU was easy. You only had to set your price without VAT and check a checkbox to apply VAT to your sales to european customers. One single price, one single sales button and shopping basket, e-junkie handled your VAT rate based on your business's country.

Since the 1st of january 2015, the EU rules have changed. A bit painful but certainly not unbearable: the VAT rate to apply to european customers is not based on the business's location any more but based now on the customer's location.

In short, it means that in 2014 e-junkie was determining the VAT rate to apply from an array of 27 values looking for the business's country. In 2015, the value should be retrieved from the customer's value, something that is perfectly doable for e-junkie since it can, at the shopping basket level, require the user to enter his/her country of residence and even the zipcode.

But no, e-junkie declined to do so and completely changed its behaviour overnight. Starting 01-jan-2015, the unique price you set in e-junkie for a product INCLUDES VAT for european customers...

E-junkie leaves a few ugly options to european businesses: have one sales button for EU customers and one for others (urgghhh...), offer a discount code to non-EU customers and other ugly solutions of that kind. E-junkie say they must validate the address and that can be done only after the bank/paypal has accepted the sale or something like that. That argument is not acceptable, since all european users of e-junkie perfectly know some european users cheat and give for instance a US address for downloadable purchases, to avoid paying VAT. It cannot be worse. And the argument that e-junkie had to do this or that does not stand, e-junkie is not a european company and does not have to comply with European Directives, they're outside of the European jurisdiction.

E-junkie has left all its european customers in limbos with respect to EU VAT. It really looks like they did not want to touch their code and UI - that have not changed in years. They already had the array of 27 VAT rates in the EU, and the VAT was  added only after the shopping basket had verified both the customer and the business were in the EU. Their refusal to tweak their code - and as a programmer I cannot believe the change was complex - is a true shame.

Let me state it clearly: this is a failure of a rarely seen magnitude and I am now looking for an alternative to e-junkie dealing better - dealing at all should I say - with EU VAT rates. I have recommended e-junkie to a gazillion of EU businesses. I am now recommending them to flee and find another shopping basket manager.

If you have a suggestion for an alternative to e-junkie, please leave a comment? Thanks!

Je viens de pinger l'ami @xibe à propos de n° de factures créés par Prestashop. Ils sont toujours sous la forme d'un préfixe au choix suivi d'un numéro démarrant à 1... Or s'il y a une chose que j'ai apprise durant mon court passage chez Amazon.fr, c'est que ce système de numérotation rend la vie très facile à vos concurrents : il leur suffit de vous faire une commande, à deux balles si c'est possible, en mois n et une autre un mois plus tard pour savoir, sur la base du numéro, combien de fois vous avez facturé en un mois !!! Une information parfois absolument stratégique...

Or le Décret n° 2003-632 du 7 juillet 2003 dit :

7° Un numéro unique basé sur une séquence chronologique et continue ; la numérotation peut être établie dans ces conditions par séries distinctes lorsque les conditions d'exercice de l'activité de l'assujetti le justifient ; l'assujetti doit faire des séries distinctes un usage conforme à leur justification initiale ;

Il faut savoir que certaines grandes entreprises en secteur fortement concurrentiel s'asseoient allègrement sur ce décret, pour la raison évoquée si-dessus. Elles maintiennent une double numérotation de factures, l'une publique non consécutive, l'autre strictement interne et conforme au décret ci-dessus ; elles disposent évidemment de l'association entre les deux numérotations. L'administration fiscale n'a, à ma connaissance, jamais râlé contre ce système indispensable, en tous cas jamais râlé auprès de ces grands comptes. Chez les petits, je ne sais pas.

Juste comme ça, pour mémoire, voici un numéro de facture (légèrement caché) émis par PayPal pour un achat effectué par un client français d'add-ons pour BlueGriffon vendus par ma boîte, française. Le siège de PayPal pour l'Europe est au Luxembourg et il se fiche donc du décret ci-dessus.

1lkmdx0zovmd9eebza5g12080kgsk4gwsXXXXXX

Pas strictement numérique ou préfixé, pas consécutif, pas facile à recopier et citer. Mais unique. Et c'est ça qui compte vraiment.

Dites vous au Gouvernement, pourrait-on svp moderniser un peu ce décret vieillissant, prendre en compte le besoin de cacher certaines informations à sa concurrence, et arrêter de risquer 15€ par infraction constatée ? Merci.

Note pour prestashop : bref, des factures à n° consécutifs gênent problablement les usagers non français...

J'ai déjà relaté mes avant-derniers soucis avec PayPal. Il y a plus récent, mais c'est tellement scandaleux que là j'ai à peine le courage d'en parler. J'y reviendrai un autre jour. Continuons donc sur la veine "téléchargement du rapport d'activité" avec le verbatim d'une conversation téléphonique que je viens d'avoir avec le service clientèle de PayPal...

<glazou> Donc il y a huit mois, vous m'avez dit de passer mes téléchargements de
         rapport d'activité de 3 mois à 1 mois ; la semaine dernière vous m'avez
         recommandé de passer de 1 mois à 15 jours. C'est inutilisable, votre
         infrastructure machine et réseau est désormais totalement sous-dimensionnée.
         Que me proposez-vous avant de me recommander de passer à des téléchargements
         d'une semaine ?
<PayPal> Utilisez le site web PayPal, cliquez sur "Service Clientèle" et envoyez-nous
         par cette page un mail nous demandant votre rapport d'activité entre telle
         et telle date et nous vous le renverrons par mail.
<glazou> En combien de temps ?
<PayPal> Rapidement.
<glazou> Certes, mais en combien de temps ?
<PayPal> Rapidement.
<glazou> Vous avez conscience que c'est ingérable et que si tout le monde se met à
         faire cela, ça va être le chaos ?
<PayPal> Non, non.

HALLUCINANT. Les bras m'en tombent... PayPal est en train de sombrer à grande vitesse, il serait bon que les analystes financiers l'évaluant s'en rendent compte.

Seen from a user's perspective and without looking at its financial results, PayPal is dying. Let me explain... First a few important details:

• I'm based in Europe, in France to be more precise.
• my internet connectivity is 18 megabits/s download, 1 megabits/s upload ; not shared. Pretty fast.

Now, the situation:

• PayPal is slower and slower every day. Often takes 10 to 20 seconds just to reach the web site's home page, 15 to 30 seconds to log in, 30 seconds to get a static page containing four links. It can take several minutes to download a two-months sales report (full text tab-separated). It's so long to download a 3-months or longer report that PayPal now says officially you can't download more than 3 months! And if you try (with the notable exception of the PDF report), your request will often - but not always - fail. PayPal is the only web service I am relying on for my business activity that is so slow. Even my french bank's web site works better...
• PayPal is more painful every day. PayPal used to have a rather good customer service over telephone. The call center is now in Tunisia (I asked) and is almost unable to tell you anything except the corporate blah-blah present in their cheat sheets. Reaching a PayPal employee is almost impossible, even for a serious problem.
• PayPal's web site is totally outdated. It has clearly grown in circles, based on an infrastructure that was probably enough six to ten years ago but is now absolutely underestimated. It's so slow it's sometimes almost unusable, its features' set is weak, it's web design should be entirely revamped, its architecture and site map is such a mess it's difficult to find valuable help or even sometimes information on PayPal's web site. If you sell goods on the Web, PayPal is now the weaker spot of your online architecture because it requires so much time and energy to find something or actually do something on their web site.

So what's going on at PayPal ? Is the once-little-startup-that-succeeded-and-became-big sleepy ? Is eBay investing enough in PayPal to let it evolve ?

Here's the problem for many people around me here in Europe who use PayPal: PayPal is simple to use but PayPal is now too slow to use. It's also now too expensive for the quality and modernity it offers. For a 29.26€ sale (excl. VAT), PayPal takes a 1.44 € fee. So 4.92%. That's ok for a service that works fast and is simple or trivial  to configure. But it's not the case any more and it becomes then too expensive.

At the same time, "PayPal drove strong payment and revenue growth while expanding margins". So what's going on at PayPal ?

Jusqu'à ce matin, proou.com acceptait vos donations PayPal en échange d'une license de déplombage d'iPhone qui allait venir. Ce matin, j'ai vu que la première commande de 50 unités était passée (ah ?). Ce soir, le site est en rideau. Bon, les baisés, levez la main svp ?

I have received since yesterday a lot of user feedback about the lack of a MacOS X version. That's only because I have no Mac here. I am not a Mac buddy and will probably not use a Mac for anything else but building Nvu or Mozilla. What do people wanting a MacOS X version think of a paypal account to support the acquisition of a Mac ?

I know what's going to be your first question: hey, I have a Mac, I can do that build for you, you only have to release it. Sorry, won't work, because there is no way I guarantee your build and its security. Don't take it bad, that's the just the way it should be.

By the way, I hacked DotClear and all permalinks in this blog now show my permanent glazman.org TLD instead of webperso.easyconnect.fr/danielglazman.