Posts Tagged ‘payments’

  • Mon, Nov 29 2010

    You may have noticed all the order completion emails going out lately for products that will be shipping soon. We hope you’re as excited as we are during this great push for the holidays!

    Here’s how it shakes down for your piggy banks:

    As people confirm their presales commitments for products in which you have influence, your share of the revenue from each order begins its journey to reality. The dollars and cents due to you move from Potential Earnings and will be tracked behind the scenes while we work to fulfill orders and collect payment. For items which are not immediately shippable, you’ll have to wait patiently until they actually roll out of our warehouse doors and into happy customers’ hands. Once each order is paid for and shipped, you’ll see your Available Balance climb.

    So don’t worry if you don’t see your cash money during this in-between phase. It’s all being calculated and tracked for you.

  • Fri, Oct 22 2010

    So about those funky account balances some of you are seeing…

    Don’t worry. You’ve got nothing to freak out about.

    Here’s what’s causing some of the discrepancies:

    Higher Available Balances – From now on, we’re requiring credit card information for all pre-order commitments, and we are no longer automatically deducting the amount of your purchase from your available balance. This is a headache that was raised often by community members, and we’re glad to have fixed it up for you.

    Lower “Potential Earnings” (Pending Balances) – On the back end, we changed the way that pre-order commitments are logged in our accounting system. This affected the way that information was streamed to your Account Balance pages, but it didn’t affect how much you’ve “potentially” earned. We’ll working on fixing that code so that your potential earnings are more accurate.

    Oh yeah, we also changed the terminology from “Pending Balance” to “Potential Earnings” to drive home the point that these earnings are just estimates, and may change after pre-order commitments are confirmed.

    Once again: your potential earnings/pending balances are still intact! They’re just hiding, and they’ll come back soon.

  • Mon, Mar 22 2010

    (Static)

    By jess at 4:31 pm

    The site’s down for a few. Get excited… we’re finally pushing our new payments system to the site! Please be patient; we’ll be back soon with many, many improvements.

  • Wed, Mar 17 2010

    Payments, I know. Everyone has been asking about payments. Even my dodgeball team. I had to skip the playoffs tonight to work on payments. Tragic, isn’t it. I mean, really, think about it. How often do you get to spend an hour of your night throwing things at other people for fun? And compete it at?! Seriously. Dodgeball is the catharsis for a New York soul.

     

    But I digress…

    Here’s the scoop on payments.

    • Houston, we are go for liftoff! – I’ve ran the tests several times now and the numbers are all adding up as expected. Efficiencies have been found and tuned. Backups and replication are in place. In fact, I’m so nerdy about this that I’ve  mapped out the number of seconds that we expect it all to take, broken down by each step. Let’s light this candle.
    • About that launch – along with the new payment system, we will be launching some other new stuff which includes Facebook Connect for Quirky. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for you all to share what you’re doing on Quirky through Facebook. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing and all.
    • T-minus … –  I’d like to get this puppy into orbit sometime tomorrow night. I’ll be working with Chris and Gui tomorrow to apply the finishing touches. If all goes well, we’ll bring the site down for a couple hours and let ‘er rip. We’ll drop a tweet when we’re ready to go.

    So, with that said, when we do launch, the product earnings you’ll see in your account will be accurate and up to date. And from then on, they will only increase.

    Welcome to Quirky ;)


  • Wed, Feb 17 2010

    Hello my quirkies, a quick update on payments. I appreciate your patience.

    1. We’re working with a kickass database team to ensure that our systems are rock solid and capable of handling the number of payments that we are expecting to process every day… which is many.

    2. Gui has been diligently digging through the code and updating the influence and payment algorithms to accommodate our new changes. Trust me, it’s a lot to comprehend in your first two weeks. My hat’s off to him.

    3. Today (Wednesday) I’m going to plan out the migration with Gui and our database guys to make sure that we have our bases covered and a schedule for doing it.

    4. We’re going to test everything on our staging environment first. We want to make sure we get this right. I’ll be pulling data to that server today and prepping it for test runs.

    As you can (hopefully) see, we’re close. By the end of the day, I should have a pretty good sense of where we stand. We’ve done the hard part (which is understanding this beast) and now we’re focused on applying the finishing touches to Frankenstein.

    So with testing starting on Thursday, I’m looking at next week to launch this sucker and get you all PAID! Once we spark this thing to life, its gonna churn out payments to thousands of users every day for years to come. Boooya!

    In the meantime, if you find yourself in need of some brain candy to tide you over, dip your hand into this virtual cookie jar of ideas and sample at will. This stuff is way more exciting than getting paid anyways.

    JK :)

    With love,
    your chief logic bomber

    P.S. They have wifi in court…

  • Mon, Sep 28 2009

    So, it’s getting to be time to ship product, which means it’s time for you guys to start earning money. We’ve updated our payment system so it’s far easier and more efficient for you all to receive your earnings. Here’s how it all works:

    As soon as you earn 75 dollars (you can view this from your payments/moneys tab in your profile) we will ask you to fill out your payment profile. Your payment profile will include info such as your mailing address (where you would like to receive your checks). Keep in mind this payment profile page is an SSL, secure, and encryped page AVAILABLE TO NO ONE except our finance and wire department.

    If you are a US citizen and you have a US bank account:

    You have the option of receiving your payments via check or ACH. We will mail your check to you and obviously pay for the postage. ACH is a direct transfer to your bank account. Think – direct deposit at work. (Only this is direct deposit from quirky.)

    If you are NOT a US citizen:

    You have the option of receiving your payments via check (which we will mail to you and pay for the mailing fee ourselves) or if you’d like the money immediately we can arrange that this money be wired to you (the small wire fee will come out of your earnings).

    Some other things to note:

    1. Once you earn 600 dollars, we will arrange for tax info to be received. This will NOT be done on our website or on your payment profile page (for obvious security reasons) but will be done offline – either by phone or by snail mail. 

    2. You can request your withdrawl any time there is 75 dollars or more in your account but not more than one request for withdrawl per week.

    3. We will process all withdrawl requests within 72 hours of receiving them. (aka your check will be cut within 72 hours of you requesting it or your money will be directly deposited within 72 hours after requesting it). 

    4. There is no limit to how much you can withdraw at any period as long as you have at least 75 dollars (all you x-namethisers will be happy to hear that one!)

    To ease your curiousity (we know you are all wondering why we got rid of the Payoneer cards?):

    – well for one, we know the 200 dollar limit was a matter of utter annoyance to you all 

    – and more importanlty, from the business side of things, we have found that this route is far more sustainable. This route does not include fees, holding companies, and we are pleased to say that the money will go straight form us to you rather than through any middle man or woman. Yeah, so thats right, you’ll get your money far more efficiently! 

    Of course, we’ve got ol’ faithful tinydino ready to answer any questions you’ve got. So go bother tinydino@quirky.com if you need anything or have any questions!