Good News! PayPal Accounts Optional for Gift Givers

July 26th, 2007 by Sara Margulis

Good news! I was wrong about your guests having to create
an account to make credit card payments.
(It happens from time to time. :)

It sounded fishy to me so I contacted PayPal and there is a
setting to make creating an account optional. Some of you had it turned on and some turned off. I had been looking at a couple’s registry that had it turned off (which it probably is by default because PP can be sneaky!)

Here’s what you need to do:

Login to your PayPal account, click the My Accounts Tab > Profile > Website Payment Preferences (Or use this link to go directly to that page.)

Scroll down to where it says “PayPal Account Optional”

Make sure that is ON. This way your guests will NOT have to create a
PayPal account. They will have the option to but not be required.

Whew!

We’re still considering building our own payment system because that would just be easier for your guests than PayPal. We’d love to hear how important this is to you– would you be willing to pay a transaction fee that is 1-3% higher than PayPal’s transaction fee if we accepted credit cards on our site?

Best,
Sara

Now More Countries for Wedding Location

July 25th, 2007 by Sara Margulis

Hola!

Just a quick note for those of you getting married abroad. You can now select your wedding location country on the Wedding Details page. Thanks for your patience on this feature.

-Sara

PayPal Payments Now Require PP Account

July 25th, 2007 by Sara Margulis

Hey Honeyfunders,

We have a bit of unfortunate news…it looks like PayPal is now requiring your gift givers to login or create an account to make a credit card payment. Today I checked it out and here’s what I found out:

The credit card form is exactly the same except at the end your guests will have to enter and confirm a password which will create a PayPal account for them. If they already have a PayPal account they will be asked to login exactly as before.

We’d love to hear from you whether this affects your decision to take credit card payments via PayPal. We’re considering some other options like accepting credit card payments as other registries do, and using Google checkout (which also requires an account). Your thoughts?

Sara & Josh

Still Working Out Some Kinks

July 25th, 2007 by Josh Margulis

Hi Honeyfunders,

We just resolved a problem with our e-mail system. Since our hosting change, all of the e-mails that have been sent via Honeyfund have been logged but not sent. We just now sent along all of the e-mails from the last two days. That includes e-mails you’ve sent to us via the Contact Us page.  Now that this problem is fixed, we’ll answer all those e-mails you sent to us. We think this is the last issue with our hosting switch.  Thanks for your patience, and please let us know if you see anything else out of the ordinary.

Hosting Change Complete

July 24th, 2007 by Sara Margulis

Yay, we did it! Our hosting change is complete. We’re pretty tired but smiling because all the data from our old hosting is now living safely on our new hosting. You might still get an occasional “Server Not Found” message throughout the day Tuesday while the Internet propagates our new IP address. Leave your comments for us here, and we’ll update you as things smooth out.

Sara & Josh

Hosting Change Scheduled for Tonight

July 23rd, 2007 by Josh Margulis

Hi there!

Okay, so you’re probably all pretty annoyed by now about all the site issues we’ve had. Well times that by 100 and you know how we feel. When you start an online business and choose a hosting company you never dream you’ll be dealing with so much headache! Lesson learned: Do NOT use DreamHost — terrible uptime, terrible response times, terrible customer service. They’ve been one problem after another and I must admit I’m embarassed we didn’t ditch them a year ago. BUT, you live and learn.

The point is we’ve scheduled the move to our new hosting for tonight. That means the site will be down for a couple hours beginning at 10 pm pacific/1 am eastern. Hopefully this won’t interfere with anyone’s plans.

Sorry about all this!

Sara & Josh

Site Outage & Slow Performance

July 19th, 2007 by Sara Margulis

Hi guys,

Many of you have noticed some intermittent outages and slow performance over the past two days. Our hosting company tells us the server we’re on has an unusually high load (i.e., someone is hogging server bandwidth!) but they’re looking into it today and should be back to us soon. We’ll let you know what we hear.

Because of these problems we’ve pushed up the hosting change to next week. Our new hosting service has better reliability and quicker response times, which means fewer headaches for you! The switch will take place in the middle of the night so it shouldn’t cause any conflicts. We’ll post more info here when we have it.

Best,

Sara & Josh

More Wedding Info & Gift Giving Updates

July 3rd, 2007 by Sara Margulis

,

Hi HFers!

Just an update on some improvements to the site we pushed last night. Now on your Wedding Details page you have space for “More Information” as well as links to external websites like hotels, travel info, visitor info, etc. You can even link to another wedding website.

We also made some updates to the Give a Gift process which should clear up some confusion around how it works for your guests.

Check it out and post your comments here.

Payment Reminder Feedback

June 17th, 2007 by Sara Margulis

Hiya,

We got some good feedback about the new payment reminder feature and will be making some tweaks to that. Just a reminder, the “Date Recieved” column on the View Gifts page is not integrated with PayPal—you have to manually input the date you got the money for all payment types. Post questions about this here in the comments field.

Website e-mail glitch

June 17th, 2007 by Sara Margulis

Howdy Honeyfunders,

Last night we discovered an e-mail glitch that we’d like to tell you about. It appears that our hosting service caps the number of e-mails that can be sent from Honeyfund.com each hour, and since we’ve grown like gangbusters this wedding season we’ve been reaching the cap several times a day. This resulted in a handful of e-mails every day that never got sent.

So, we sent the backlog last night and are following up today with those of you who were negatively affected.

Fortunately there were only four e-mails from gift givers in that bunch. We’ve replied to them now explaining the delay.

We’ve also implemented a failsafe so that if there are leftover e-mails one hour, they are sent the next.

Aye yaye yaye, the wonderful world of technology. :)