At 6/7/02 8:01 AM, Ross Wm. Rader wrote: >Important reading...
I've mentioned this before, but since the subject has come up again: I still strongly feel that if a domain is renewed with OpenSRS, but then transferred away before the 45 days are up (causing OpenSRS to get the $6 refund), the reseller should be credited the $10 registration fee (with the intent that the reseller should refund the retail fee to the customer). The current scheme leaves the reseller wide open to (fully justified) chargebacks. If I were the end user, and I found that I'd paid an OpenSRS reseller for a service that was worthless, I would certainly expect a refund. This change would not cost OpenSRS anything other than the work to initially set it up (and of course, the lost fees for renewals that didn't actually happen) -- it's just an accounting entry. Even with this change, resellers would still be at a disadvantage, because presumably most of us would pay the credit card fees on both the original customer charge and the refund, costing us a buck or two, but that's the cost of doing business. Paying OpenSRS $10 for a service not rendered that didn't cost OpenSRS anything should not be a cost of doing business, though. The response in the past has been roughly "tell your customers not to do this because they won't get a refund". I agree it would be better if people didn't do this, but I don't think it's acceptable as a policy; we're trying to encourage business, not warn people away by telling them that if they renew with us and then want to go somewhere else in the near future, they'll lose all their money. A related change that might cut down on the incidence of this problem is removing the requirement that we have to send a message to OpenSRS to allow expired domains to be transferred to other registrars. While that's fine in theory, some customers don't realize that we can do that (they think we have the same policies as Verisign), so they renew their domain to release it and attempt a transfer soon after. If the restriction didn't exist in the first place, they might not renew it with us right before transferring. I really don't see how the restriction on inter-registrar transfers of expired domains is helpful; we've all agreed in the past that artificial restrictions on transfers do not help anybody. Hopefully these suggestions can be taken into consideration for the future. Thanks! -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies "The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was."
