I'm not a seasoned Paypal seller (yet!) and I currently have a dilemma. Yesterday morning I awoke to a payment of £50 into my paypal account for a template off one of my sites. I'd also had an email just half an hour later from the supposed buyer requesting the template (I was in bed at the time and don't run an automated system – this is stated on the website). I was all set to get the template to send however I checked over the sale page one more time and noticed that the name of the account holder was different to the name in use on the email address of the account holder eg. (please note these are the real names!)nName: Ben SmithnEmail: jackjones@yahoo.comnnThe email requesting the download link had come from the email address with the name 'Jack Jones'. A little strange I thought. I contacted a friend who deals with Paypal payments on a daily basis and has dealt with a lot of fraud transactions and he told me that most likely it was fraud and was worth refusing a sale rather than losing my own money.nnSo I've contacted Paypal through their site informing them of what I think is a possible hijacked account and also what I should do with the £50. I know it sounds like a strange question, just refund it surely. However if the account is left open and the hijacker gets the £50 back they could go off to someone else and dupe them with it and if that person doesn't check as closely they could get caught out. I replied to the guy as well asking why there was this difference on his account but 36+ hours later I've had no response leading me to definitely believe it's hijacked.nnI'm not interested in keeping someone else's money but I'm not sure if I'll hear back from Paypal on this or if I should just refund the cash. I know a few people reading may have more experience than me with Paypal, do you just refund? What reason do you give usually?

The sequel to ADSL Woes has already begun!! I have had such a **** day of phone calls. This morning I was given our Mac code for moving our Broadband to another supplier. All seemed fine, called the new company (I like a company that answers within 2 rings!) and set the ball in motion. Then a couple of hours later they called me back saying there was a problem with the code and it was one of three things
1. The code was invalid
2. The code had already been given to another BB company
3. The old ISP (UK Online) had begun cancellation proceedings on the line.

Well the first was checked and seemed fine, the second option wasn't an option as far as we were concerned so that left an invalid code from the ISP or a cancellation on the line. So another hour spent on the phone to get through to the correct department, and we were told that the code was valid and no cancellation had been put through. So another call to the new ISP and they went off to ask BT why the error had happened. Half hour later a call back telling us that UK Online had definitely put through a cancellation order on the BB on our line on Sunday and gave us the order code! So the Mac code, generated for Saturday but not given to us until today was completely useless. So we called UK Online again (yep another 45 minutes to get through) and I spoke to someone who was insistent that there was no cancellation, that they couldn't generate the Mac code if a cancellation had been put through (clearly ignoring the fact I kept saying the code was generated first then a cancellation put through), she even asked another department who said no cancellation had gone through – yet BT said there was (and right now I know who I believe!). Then the bullet hit, Dave spoke to her and she informed him that unless we paid them for the rest of our contract (which we are wholly within our right to cancel according to their Terms and Conditions) they wouldn't do anything about it. No manager or supervisior was available to talk to (likely story) and she wouldn't give us a number for anyone else.

So after all this Dave called Ofcom for advise on what to do. Essentially we are being blackmailed into paying for a contract which we shouldn't have to pay for because they've been sneaky to generate us a Mac code and then cancel the broadband right after! I hate not being in control and right now we have no control over our own telephone line. Ofcom gave us the number for BT Wholesale so we called them to find out exactly what was going on with our line. The cease was definitely ordered on Sunday by UK Online however soon after they also put in a reprovision order to supply us with broadband again! Even the woman at BT said she'd never seen anything like it. Unfortunately there's nothing they can do which is so unbelievably frustrating as they could just fix it all there and then.

So we decided to bite the bullet, call UK Online and offer to pay the remaining £75 for the get out of jail option. Then get the BB moved and write a long letter detailing it all to the Ombudsman and see if we could get our money back this way along with compensation for the amount of telephone time spent on this. Another 45 minutes to an hour wait and we got through to someone who suddenly said something different. This person was actually more helpful, she passed our problem on to a technician there who's looking into why the Mac code isn't working and is going (in theory) to call us back tomorrow to let us know what's happened.

So yet more ups and downs over this whole issue, yet again ridiculous customer support from one girl we spoke to twice with regards to the whole cancellation of BB on the line and her defiance in saying it wasn't true and then being blackmailed to get any further action. Fingers crossed tomorrow may be a better day, I hope so, I've lost most of today to the telephone

Thank god for chocolate icecream…

I've finally made a start on restructuring one of our busiest sites and the way the products are offered for sale. At present there are 11 digital products and each product groups 4-7 items, however despite the visitor numbers we've had to the site, the sales have been exceptionally poor, less than 1% even. So I had a rethink and concluded that either it was down to the UK market being cautious with online buying from an unknown seller, or that the idea of having to pay for 4+ items when you only wanted one of the items wasn't worth it to people, regardless of cost.nnI'm hoping it's the latter reason. I met a friend of a client about 6 months ago. An American guy who used to be in marketing, mass marketing. My client has a web site where he sells a yearly subscription for access to 4 items, and his friend was explaining that people could be put off by having to pay for a subscription to all 4 items when they only want access to one. It made sense to me. How many times do you rethink purchasing an item in say a supermarket because despite it being a good deal you only want one or two items from it.nnSo I've made a start on the job at hand, planning the way to set up the shop to give easy navigation and hopefully ensure to get people buying. Of course the prices are also being decided upon. The large product group is priced at £8.99 so I figured that I could offer each individual item at £2.50. The downside to this is that the product group isn't priced highly. The price itself is/was set by the original producer of the product so I don't feel I can increase the group price to make the individual prices more worthwhile. In light of the small amount each item will make I'm going to build in the Paypal IPN system to set up the entire process to be automated, emailing the item purchased as soon as Paypal has confirmed the payment. Of course there is always the risk of suddenly having a chargeback for whatever reason but from what I've seen with these and from what I've read on a couple of blogs from people who deal with Paypal payments on a daily basis, these can be avoided (when possible) by having the right wording and terms and conditions available to the purchaser.nnSo that's where I am so far. I've designed the layout for the products, I've set up the database structure and now I just have to find an easy way to import about 90 items into it! With the pressure starting to ease a little (finally) in my business, I'm hoping to work on this in the evenings and get it all finished off over the next couple of weeks, possibly in time to use the spare £50 Google AdWords voucher we have, in time for Christmas.nnI know the single item price to a few people out there may sound low however even 1% a day on sales would net us around £10 a day which would be nice (and be a good boost to hit my daily target)

Okay it's not as bad as it sounds. I'm still at my parents, and I do get on very well with them so it's not an issue of staying with them, however I miss my own bed, I miss my organisation for work and I just want to go home! We've been staying at my parent's house since 2nd October which will be 4 weeks on Monday. Our ADSL is still down and we've finally cancelled and are moving elsewhere. So hopefully by the end of next week we'll be back home and with a faster ADSL line to boot.

I also want to get home to start preparing the garden for next year before the winter sets in. There's so much digging to be done, especially as we've got to clear out the back section (where we dumped all of the stones and rubbish we found!). We've also missed out on most of our tomatoes from this year and the peppers have been ready for a while and we can't use them!

Still, I've finally been able to get a little organised down here and 3 major projects are coming to a close now. One is launched, one is virtually finished and one just has a few niggles to fix. Then I can move on to the next in the list! Yep work is still busy as ever however we're starting to plough through it a little. It's a scary thought that Christmas will be here within 2 months though. The year has passed so quickly. Next week my Mum and I are off to London Christmas shopping

4 weeks ago today we started having ADSL problems. The speed had dropped to virtually nothing. After tests from our ISP they submitted the problem to BT. On Saturday 30th September the ADSL went completely and we've not had any connection since. During this time Dave and I have been staying down at my parents place to continue working. Come Monday we won't have been home for 4 weeks!

Every week we've been spending 20-30 minutes on the phone, 2-3 times a week, to get through to technical support to be told that there's been no reply from BT and that someone would call. However nobody ever called! It's been a major disruption to the business, the amount of work we have on and of course sheer frustration at no understanding why there's a problem. We've been told BT said everything was fine, we've been told BT weren't responding to their request for an update and one customer service person told us it wasn't their problem and that we had to call BT!!

After a chat with Khalid yesterday, he had a friend run a line check for us and told me that the ADSL was enabled and that the ISP just weren't doing their job at getting it sorted. So after a check on the terms and conditions I phoned customer services and told them they had until Saturday, the 30 day mark, to get our ADSL running otherwise we would cancel without penalty as we're still within our year's contract. Strangely enough the firm words seemed to have made a mark as we had a call yesterday evening from someone at the ISP, we were told that there had been a failure at the exchange and BT should have fixed it on 30th September. This was new to us as we'd just been told BT had said there was no problem! They asked if we were still intending to cancel because if we were they wouldn't get the issue fixed.

We've spent the past 4 weeks being lied to, fobbed off over it all and essentially ignored. Who knows who's to fault, BT or the ISP. After being told today it would take another 10 days to get our ADSL activated again (when it was meant to have been done within 24 hours originally!) we decided to cancel. Perhaps it will take that long but I'd rather get an ISP we can trust to tell us the truth and not just leave us without broadband. We'll be moving to fast.co.uk as I know of the owner and he's already aware of our situation, and apparently the support is second to none which is something you need when you rely on the internet as much as I do.

So now that the ADSL is almost in safe hands plus the completion of 3 projects this week I may start to relax and get rid of the stress that's making me ill!