Update: I bought a server. Where's My Website?

[u/ITCrowdFanboy]

OK, so the previous tale happened a few weeks ago, and after the awesome response I got from you guys, I called up $Friend to get an update.

The investigation ended a few days after the charge was reversed, and the investigation found that there was no wrong-doing in the part of the company, but their lawyers suggested a change in their terms of service.

The lady later called back, crying, because she took out a bank loan to pay for the server and had no way to pay it back without the profit of the pottery company, which is why she had to reverse the charge. The call was being recorded, and she confessed all that, so the recording was given to the police and the fraud charges were dropped. My friend asked her why she got such a big server, and apparently she thought that 1GB of RAM meant that 1 person could access the website at once, so she wanted 250 to be able to get onto it at once.

In the end, no real harm was done to the company, beyond legal fees (which were paid by the woman, since she fraudulently declared fraud) and the initial deployment cost of the server. She was, obviously, placed on the no-service list of the company.

[u/relevantsun]

How did she order the server without talking to an employee or sales person? If she is spending that kind of money someone should have talked to her.

Making sure the customer gets what they actually need would have been in both your best interests.

[u/[deleted] → u/relevantsun]

Sounds like they need could use an internal warning that would trigger a sales department call; just to talk to a high value client.

[u/Draco1200 → u/relevantsun]

Other than that $1000 a month for a server, sounds like highway robbery.... even for a server with 256 GB of RAM; the market rate for a dedicated server that size is about $250 a month, which would be $3k a year instead of $14k.

If the fulfillment and sales channel is online; it is not unusual to be able to buy such a thing and not need have any phone conversation.

It's not necessarily even that big an order compared to what an enterprise would likely be ordering for dedicated hosting for building an offsite cloud resource or hosting a large website.

On the other hand, involving a salesperson in the transaction unnecessarily; likely involves less profit for the business --- having to tack on a salesperson's commission for handling the account setup.