#ez pay

Already reeling from falling stock prices as well as ongoing protests inspired by the 2013 documentary Blackfish, the theme park chain SeaWorld is now facing another lawsuit, this time from a group led by a Los Angeles woman claiming the company defrauds customers by automatically renewing their annual passes without proper notice.

According to a Courthouse News Service report, lead plaintiff Shery Gargir signed up at some unspecified point in the last four years for a two-year pass to SeaWorld San Diego, electing to use the park website's "EZPay" option, which charged her $28.82 up front, then collected $5.66 on a monthly basis for the duration of her two-year agreement.

When the term was up, however, the charges never stopped.

"Defendant failed, and continues to fail, to present the automatic renewal offer terms, or continuous service offer terms, in a clear and conspicuous manner," Gargir argues in her complaint, noting that SeaWorld collected $693 million in subscription revenues in the first three-quarters of 2014 alone, with "approximately 30%" of its overall ticket sales revenue being generated online. Twenty percent of revenues are said to come from within California.

Up until late this morning, links from within our EZ Pay pre-notification e-mails had Google Analytics parameters appended to them. We failed to notice that these parameters were not playing nice with the SFChronicle.com, so the link to http://www.sfchronicle.com/ultimateaccess would result in an error page.

This automatic appending of analytics parameters has been temporarily disabled. If anyone had been clicking that one particular link and running into problems, well... There's the explanation. Two weeks too late!

I'm not going to spend a lot of time writing about this today.

It happened again. Our EZ Pay notice by e-mail process deployed without new data so it re-sent all of last week's e-mails (minus any customers that opted out of the daily e-mail on or after 1/4/13.)

Clearly 2013 is off to a great start.

We'll get the proper e-mails (for the pre-notices we successfully created this morning) sent out ASAP and I'll harass our IT staff to implement the necessary code changes to stop this from happening. (Because that still hasn't happened - not to put them down or anything! They're just as busy and short staffed as Circulation is! Sigh...)

I can't win. I just can't win!

This is, what, the 5th or 6th week in a row with a problem in our "EZ Pay notice by e-mail" process? It has to be.

Today's problem is a little bit different. You see, the data was generated as normal from our subscriber database. The data file was uploaded to the e-mail service provider with the pertinent details of the notification. The file was successfully processed and the e-mails all went out on time. Sounds great, right?

No, not even close. The file was twice as big as it should have been because it contained ALL of last week's subscribers. Normally when data gets repeated it just means a duplicate e-mail (on a later date, of course). Sadly, with today's error, all of the notice dates updated to show 12/28/12 which is, undoubtedly, going to make people think we're trying to charge them twice. I didn't look into the data enough to see if the date stated for the charge itself was also pushed out a week for all the repeats of the 12/21/12 notices.

I want to be clear that customers will NOT be charged twice. Our system literally won't allow that. You have to be within a week of your current billing cycle's expiration (including on the day of the expiration) in order to be eligible for the charge. Now, it is possible for two credit/debit card EZ Pay charges to occur back to back (one week after the first), but that's only if the first charge either doesn't pay you forward because you're so far into arrears or because the new expiration date was within a week of the next Tuesday. Does that make any sense? Even that is not a duplicate charge. You may not get a pre-notification for each charge because of the timing, but they are notduplicates.

The pre-notifications are not the charge. They are just a notice. It is a completely separate process that generates the payments and it does not care when your notice went out. It only cares about when you expire.

The data for the latest pre-notifications for customers on our EZ Pay credit/debit card automatic payment program was not successfully update today. As a result, the e-mail notifications that went out used last Friday's data. The e-mails would've gone to the same subscribers as last week, minus anyone that has opted out of those e-mails since 11/9/12. The data in the e-mails should be the same as it was on 11/9/12.

It's possible that data from the old e-Edition replaced some of your other subscriber data since 11/9, which could make for a confusing e-mail! (I won't go into details.)

Basically, ignore the EZ Pay e-mails sent at ~8:00am PST today, November 16th, 2012. We'll re-deploy those e-mails once the data has been updated with today's EZ Pay pre-notifications. We apologize for any inconvenience.