EventElephant

Reamer Fanny

Event Elephant: Lisa wrote: »

These queries would be best directed at our finance team. I will be happy to send them your details to contact you or you can get them at finance@eventelephant.com.

We also always promote the use of the Event Organisers' own PayPal or bank merchant account so that they can collect their funds in real-time.

Wow there's a line I haven't heard before

DinoRex

How close to the 5% does the number of chargebacks come for everyone else?

Just happens to skim over 5% for me.

Trojan

Lisa, thanks for the quick reply. While I have sent on these questions to your finance team, it does strike me that these should be fairly basic questions for a representative of the company to be able to answer.

Email to EventElephant finance team wrote:

1) How often do chargebacks go above 5% for events run by your customers, thus leading to held funds?
2) Can you provide evidence to your customers that a bank has put a hold on all of their funds?

Given the questions and experiences detailed above, and even if you have to go ask the finance team yourself, surely for the sake of your company's reputation you can go and do that so you can provide answers these questions? If you don't have the authority to do so, surely you can ask someone to authorise you or to post answers themselves here?

Otherwise, it is very difficult to interpret the form replies as anything other than simply avoiding the question, which I'm sure is not your intention.

ASIMON0V

DinoRex wrote: »

How close to the 5% does the number of chargebacks come for everyone else?

Just happens to skim over 5% for me.

tantalisingly close to sub5%.....we have c. €10,000 still owing to us after 15 months....our total event revenue was c. €14,500. We received nothing for the first 13 months and then three partial payments since then.

Trojan

Event Elephant: Lisa wrote: »

These queries would be best directed at our finance team.

In fairness to the EventElephant finance team, it took them less than 3 hours to avoid answering my questions.

Emailed questions to EventElephant finance team wrote:

1) Approximately how often do chargebacks go above 5% for events run by your customers, thus leading to held funds?
2) Can you provide evidence to your customers that a bank has put a hold on all of their funds?

EventElephant finance team form reply wrote:

Dear $firstName,

Please note that our web portal runs a wide range of different types of events. Some Event Organisers that use our Client Trust Account are not affected by charge backs and then there are others that are. EventElephant cannot control the charge back process as we do raise them nor do we control the resolution.

If the event organiser chooses to use the EventElephant Merchant Account to process their bookings the funds are held in a Client Trust Account.

The best way to avoid the 5% threshold risk and the potential delay in event transfers is to use your own merchant account. This means that you receive funds in real time and we facilitate in the set up. If you set this up with PayPal you are also charged a preferential charity rate as a registered charity.

We also donate 20% of our fee to registered charities.

Please use the following link (hxxp://www.eventelephant.com/uploadedFiles/ee-payment-options.pdf) which discusses the pros and cons of each payment option we offer.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind Regards,
Finance Team.

I've asked them again to answer the 2 simple questions above but at this point I'd expect nothing more than further prevarication.

This is not a company I could recommend to my clients or friends, regardless of their claims about avoiding risk with your own merchant account. Nothing they've said in any of their communications leads me to trust them with event finances. Good luck to everyone involved in trying to get their money back from these guys.

DinoRex

Has one of these chargeback issues EVER been resolved is another question.

miju

Lets try an even more basic question for Lisa. Can you confirm or deny if Bank or Ireland or AIB are amongst the banks you are currently dealing with?

r3nu4l

At this stage I think it would be much more beneficial to both Event Elephant and their customers if a member of the EE Finance team was given access to the Event Elephant Rep account to answer questions.

That is of course if Event Elephant have any real interest in answering any of the questions...

Right now this PR exercise is failing badly and appears to be simply alienating people further and making people even more suspicious than they already are. There really is such a thing as bad PR folks. In fairness to 'Lisa', she is simply toeing the line here and trotting out approved statements. No real communication here.

OU812

Peterdalkey wrote: »

Given the damage to the Event Elephant brand from all the negative publicity they seem to be able to generate and the market for this type of service, there is an interesting business opportunity to be exploited by someone!! The key would be to get the operations/payment end as good as the marketing of the incumbent.

There's another one already out there - www.ticketfriend.com - NOTE: Not involved with them, have just used them for an event.

Absolutely fantastic & very happy with the results with them

Roscoe Holscomb

A general question re: EE and chargebacks - has anyone with experience of using similar companies (eg. EventBrite etc.) encountered such chargeback issues that prevent the payment of any funds to event organisers for years (nearly 2 years in our own case)? Or is it something that affects EventElephant customers alone?

Trojan

Ok, in fairness to the Event Elephant finance team, they did answer the questions at the second time of asking.

EventElephant finance team second reply wrote:

Dear myname,

May I answer your question as you raise them?

1) Approximately how often do chargebacks go above 5% for events run by your customers, thus leading to held funds?

A) I am sure you will appreciate there are different types of event i.e. level of bookings, time frames of promotion etc etc. In saying that approximately 20% of our event organisers are affected by charge backs on initially sign up. There are 18% affected by the 5% threshold. It should be noted that a charge back is only successful if it is proven that an event did not go ahead or a "stolen" card was used in the booking.

2) Can you provide evidence to your customers that a bank has put a hold on all of their funds?

A) We can provide examples of the charge back documentation that is received from the clearing banks. But we cannot pass on the information specific to the event as the we do not receive the full information ie card holder name, contact details to name a few items. But once again the information communicated is different from the different payment types.

Kind Regards,
Finance Team.

There you go - they seem to have almost 1 in every 5 events affected by >=5% chargebacks. That's way more than I'd expect, but breaking down numbers that's averaging approximately 1% of all attendees of all events doing a chargeback (please correct me if I got the maths wrong).

For that they're running into held funds scenarios 20% of the time. (You'd think with those kind of numbers they'd be a lot better at explaining this stuff)

The second answer is the deal-breaker for me - they won't provide any evidence to customers that a bank is holding all of the event's funds. Surely you can make that happen, especially if it's occurring with 20% of your customers. It doesn't have to have card holder details, just some kind of evidence demonstrating that a bank is holding all of the event's funds - it could simple be a letter from the bank. Without that, I wouldn't take it simply at their word.

A step in the right direction, thanks for answering those questions.

Bordeo

i know for a fact that aib act as one of their merchants. i dont know if that is the only one they have or if there are several

Terrontress

Bordeo wrote: »

i know for a fact that aib act as one of their merchants. i dont know if that is the only one they have or if there are several

Do you mean that they act as their acquirer?

Bordeo

I know aib provide merchant banking services

Bordeo

Below is the contents of an email I have received from the chargeback section of a merchant bank. I dont understand how these chargebacks are not getting resolved


In general terms if a card is reported stolen the issuing bank stop thecard, on receipt of a chargeback we would need to see how the transaction wastaken ie) chip and pin is the best defence of all and we would absolutelydefend any chargeback where chip and pin is used.

When a transaction is E-commerce unless it is 3d secure the situationchanges, we cannot defend these and the liability is with the merchant whoprocessed the transaction.

We have 42 days to respond to a Chargeback and then The issuing Bank hasa further 30 days to respond to us, if they choose to continue thedispute. We then have a further 30 days to respond further to the 2ndChargeback or pre-arbitration. At this point they then have a further 30days to respond to our defence. After this if we are going all the way tofiling (rare in these cases) we would have to wait for Visa to make adecision.

However I must add in cases of fraud it would be rare for a case to go “allthe way” as fraud is usually identified early on in the case and unless thetransaction is chip and pin or a signed and swiped voucher or 3d secure Ecommerce there would be no defence.

r3nu4l

Admin note: if you run a company offering similar services to EasyElephant please do not use this thread to advertise.

nipper banks

I note that there is a judgement registered against Event Elephant in this weeks Stubbs Gazette. I don't know anything about it, but thats the fact.

Roscoe Holscomb

There appears to have been a judgement registered against them in November 2012: http://www.insolvencyjournal.ie/search_result.aspx?indexCatalogue=ijsearch&searchQuery=eventelephant&wordsMode=0

Event Elephant: Alan

Many of our organisers who have had a problem with chargebacks on their events switch over to using their own merchant account to collect the funds for their future events. See what they had to say about using their own merchant account http://www.eventelephant.com/own-merchant-testimonials

Oryx

Lisa you sure are a glass half full kinda person!

Roscoe Holscomb

How about a "Waiting to be paid thousands of euro" testimonials page as well?

DinoRex

I'd have to imagine that many of the organisers who have had a problem with chargebacks won't use your service ever again or recommend you to anyone else.

Bordeo

Lisa you just make me laugh. You are unbelieveable. Start up a page for the negative experiences. See this link for what the people in the UK has done http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/event-elephant-ltd-pay-your-creditors-on-time

Trojan

This is a wonderful case study for how not to do social media.

EastcourtManor

My company, Eastcourt Manor, used Event Elephant last year for our events. Initially there were no problems but the service deteriorated significantly during 2012. Event Elephant currently owe us just over £550 (including interest) for events in November 2012, January 2013 and February 2013.

Trying to talk to Event Elephant's finance department is pointless. Email replies are generic and identical. Phone conversations are with people who really have no clue what's going on.

I have communicated by email with every single person who booked on these events and they've all confirmed that they have paid (one has even sent me his credit card statements!). My customers are horrified that they've paid for an event in good faith but the organiser hasn't received payment.

Event Elephant provide a terrible service, avoid at all cost.


Gwen Nathan
Eastcourt Manor

P.S. Lisa - the IDs of my events in dispute are 15445, 16480 & 16481 - if you feel unable to respond to my complaints in a public forum, please do get in touch via gwen@eastcourtmanor.co.uk. I have email correspondence with all six of the bookers for these events whose payments could be subject to query under your 'terms' of business, all of whom have confirmed their payment. If you would like copies, please do let me know.

Reamer Fanny

Event Elephant: Lisa wrote: »

Many of our organisers who have had a problem with chargebacks on their events switch over to using their own merchant account to collect the funds for their future events. See what they had to say about using their own merchant account http://www.eventelephant.com/own-merchant-testimonials

You honestly must take these people for idiots, thankfully I haven't been personally affected by this.

slmrt

Event Elephant: Lisa wrote: »

Many of our organisers who have had a problem with chargebacks on their events switch over to using their own merchant account to collect the funds for their future events. See what they had to say about using their own merchant account http://www.eventelephant.com/own-merchant-testimonials

I see its more Smoke and Mirrors from eventelephant, trying distract from the real issue i.e. where is the the money they are withholding for many many months from a lot of its customers for questionable reasons. Blaming these same customers for stupidly using a service which Eventelephant offered and charged for.

We and others used and paid for this service, as we were not in a position to open our own merchant account, so all this bluff that we could have set up our own merchant account is a red herring by them to sidetrack the argument away from the core issue - where is the money?

We no longer believe the reason given by them of chargebacks and actually feel that they never existed as
1. No evidence of them has ever been provided
2. Other organisations have contact every one of those that paid money and none had initiated charge backs and we have confirmed this with many those that donated money to us.
3. The alleged number of chargebacks are massively above industry norms, with chargebacks in relation to charities even rarer
4. There is a very tight timeframe for chargebacks to be resolved which looks to be have way exceeded in these cases
5. The small sums of money involved in the transactions means that its highly unlikely given the cost involved that anyone would process far done the chargeback process, ie a few months

So Lisa, where is our money? i.e. money donated to our charity, a volunteer 999 service.

This has been a very unpleasurable experience for us and a distraction from our work for nearly 12 months now. Their customer service has been terrible and they seem to spend more time on social media than working to pay back peoples money. So is you are thinking of using this company we advise to do your research and think again.

Bordeo

is there anyone getting any new info on their funds due from event elephant? we are still getting the same waffle and its so frustrating

nipper banks

Bordeo wrote: »

is there anyone getting any new info on their funds due from event elephant? we are still getting the same waffle and its so frustrating

I do want want to be prejudicial, so I will just state the following facts:

• There are 2 recent judgements against them for a total of €63k
• They have not filed their accounts within the deadline required by the CRO
• Their last accounts had a Balance Sheet deficit of over €1m

These are facts, draw your own conclusions.

Bordeo

I just purchased their full credit report from solocheck. it makes shocking reading. red alerts all over it. if anyone wants a copy of it send me a private message and I will forward it on to anyone that wants it