PayPal Purge nebuminding

Bugabee
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Danny and I have been nebuminding the purging of paypal from Beeminder’s payments, but the project has still managed to suffer diffusion of responsibility and scope creep and generally Mustela-ish behavior, so we’re moving the nebuminding record to the public, here.

The goal has a rate of only 5 words per day, and an autoratchet of 7 days, so we should theoretically be able to check in once a week and do some progress towards purging paypal, summarize here, and then eventually paypal will be gone?

The last thing we did publicly re purging paypal was to send an email offering a honey money incentive to people with paypal as their default paytype if they change to something else.

There are currently:

  • 2795 users with paypal as their paytype
  • 2553 of them have only paypal
  • 73 of them have added data in the last month

Our goal: come up with a next step to take towards being able to remove paypal from the payments infrastructure. In otherwords we need to move those 2000+ people off of paypal. Most of them are inactive, so there’s not really any lost revenue from switching them.

TODO:

  • :white_check_mark: Decide an action to take: Fear-of-god a subset of people with paypal as their only paymethod
  • :white_check_mark: Decide on the subset to execute this next step on – minimal / most restricted subset
  • Draft the email / rake task to do it
  • Complete TODOs in email draft
  • Do it
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But you can still buy H$ with Paypal at the end of all this, right?

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As one-off purchases I think this should be easy enough to keep supporting. I think Stripe may even support this by now? Having PayPal as a payment-method-on-file to be able to charge for future derailments is mainly what we want to purge.

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Last I checked Stripe only supports Paypal payments based on the “presentment currency”, but also based on the location of the Stripe account accepting the payment, which currently does not include the US, or USD. (See both “Presentment currency” under the Payment method properties, and “Country availability” at PayPal payments | Stripe Documentation). Presumably this has something to do with politicking and Competition between Stripe & Paypal?

That said, the cost of supporting one-off honey-purchase transactions via paypal, that is much less costly (in terms of tech debt) than integrating paypal as part of the default payments cycle. So it might not be too costly to keep buying of honey in one-off transactions available.

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Nice. I like seeing the founders show their goals in public, especially when it’s a nebuminding goal.

I don’t use PayPal as my payment method here, but why purge it?

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Mainly that it makes everything in our code more complicated, having to handle two different payment providers. Plus accounting and analytics. And Stripe has so many nice tools, including 3rd-party tools that access your Stripe data, that having all our revenue in Stripe has a ton of benefits. Also PayPal is just a nightmare to work with compared to Stripe.

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Ok, we decided to start with the lowest stakes group of users: the folks who’ve got paypal as their default, but never even created a goal. We’re going to send them a “Fear of God” email – something along the lines of: “we’re cleaning up unused accounts. if you want to keep your username, do [CALL TO ACTION] before [DATE], otherwise your account will be deleted”.

query:
User.where(:default_paytype=>"paypal", :stripe_id=>nil, :golcreated.in=>[0,nil])

email draft:

Subject: create a goal to keep your (USERNAME) beeminder account

Hi there, it’s been years since you used your Beeminder account. We consider your account abandoned and want to reclaim your username and URL – beeminder.com/USERNAME.

If you’re done for good, simply do nothing and we’ll delete your account and free up its URL in [TODO: amount of time].

BUT WAIT! If you still want your account, here’s what to do:

[TODO: finalize call-to-action]

If you run into any trouble with that, please reply to this email and we’ll help sort it out!

Thank you for trying out Beeminder way back when!
Danny and Bethany, cofounders

P.S. In case you forgot, Beeminder is about committing to a goal, tracking your progress, and getting charged actual money if you go off track.

P.P.S. There is no unsubscribe link down here because this is a one-time email about a change to your account. If you want to receive no more emails like this, well, do nothing and in [TODO: amount of time] your account will be deleted! Or reply to this email and we can delete it right away? But seriously, maybe give us a try first?

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My suggestion is that the call to action should be “create your first goal”. That makes the followup where we actually delete accounts real easy! But it is potentially a big hurdle, especially as it will force them to add a credit card as part of goal setup (since they only have paypal currently). @dreev what do you think?

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That’s a fine hurdle.

Having forgotten about Beeminder they’ve also almost certainly forgotten that they’d configured PayPal as the payment method. Let’s double check that the site experience is sufficiently hand-holdey for such returning folks, which also will be a benefit to onboarding newbees in general.

Suspect that there will be 3 groups of folks: non-responders, rage-quitters, and the newly energised. Seems like a slim slice that will remember/curious their way to the site and be offended by the payment options — and they seem unlikely to be Type Bee. The newly energised will welcome the reminder and become productive beemindees.

Speaking of reminders, for the initial run could further subdivide into folks who no longer receive even the annual beemail. The monthlies at least receive regular nudges that we exist, and could have curioused their way back before the email. Maybe that’s an argument for starting with them as a subgroup, since they didn’t unsubscribe altogether.

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