Help Center Update
Previously we had our help center on a separate website that was available at Support.TH3DStudio.com. That domain will now direct to the new help center. We’ve gone through and updated old URLs to point to the new locations. If for some reason you find a broken link somewhere please let us know by Contacting Us.
Having the Help Center on the main website will also allow for our live chat reps to keep the conversation going if you are switching between the store and help center pages. Previously, if you left the main site to go to the Help Center the chat session would not carry over. With this new setup it is not an issue anymore.
We are making these changes to help better serve you all and get you assistance in an efficient and timely manner. We appreciate your support and hope you like what we have to offer from our products as well as our 3D printing articles.
Live Chat Update
We’ve also upgraded our Live Chat system to add more features and have some FAQs on them. You can also leave a quick message for us online that will then make a ticket so we can reply to you when we are open again. There are also some bonuses in there from time to time like discount codes as well. 🙂
PayPal Update
After bringing the issues with chargeback fraud to PayPals attention that we posted about a few weeks ago they have assured us that they will help us handle cases better in the future. We are giving them one more chance so we have added them back to our website. We also got many requests from customers that only want to pay with PayPal. If fraud becomes an issue with PayPal again we will revisit having them as an option.
Credit Card Processing Fixed
You may have noticed that 2 times today our website was not able to load the checkout page. This was due to issues with our, now former, credit card processing company. We try to support smaller businesses when we can and STAX was a company that promised a lot but did not deliver. They are an alternative to big companies like Stripe for Credit card processing.
The issue with them is that they do not have a solid infrastructure for handling online stores like ours being against used for what is known as “card testing”. People from outside the US were using our checkout page to test cards and instead of them blocking the person on their end via their payment gateway, they just lockout our account. We have never had this issue with Stripe and while Stripe is not perfect, we had much fewer issues with them.
Payment processors like Stripe have a very good plugin for integration with our website (Woocommerce) platform that has features to thwart card testing. STAX uses a very generic NMI gateway plugin that doesn’t have the ability to prevent this type of behavior on the website. They locked us out of our account 2 times in less than 24 hours because the plugin they say to use is lacking the ability to detect card testing. Because of this, we have switched back to Stripe.
We’ve given STAX many chances to work through their issues and the reality is that while they save us money on processing cards, their infrastructure to handle online payments is not as robust as companies like Stripe. Since we switched back to Stripe if you had a stored payment method on your TH3D account it will need to be re-entered in your My Account page.