TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

Rumors about non-payment of developers my MobiHand’s have made circles in the BlackBerry market for some time – reminding veterans of the Palm ESD which also almost went belly-up and repaid the developers over a few years.

A recent CrackBerry forum post purpoted to be coming from MobiHand now reads as following – emphasis added by yours truly

To help you folks avoid further misunderstanding on a couple of issues, here is some information about recent topics we’ve seen discussed on these forums. First, MobiHand continues to provide customer service in the same manner as in past. In the few cases of activation code problems that have actually been referred to us, the cause has been the removal, by the applicable developer, of the linkage between our systems and the developer’s systems, which is needed to generate codes based on the application’s DRM model. We encourage developers to continue to provide service and enable us to provide service to our mutual customers. We are late on some payments, but we are working to resolve that and it is not appropriate or helpful to the situation for any of us to hurt or scare our customers.

Another issue recently raised has been “refunds” recorded on the system over the last few days. Almost all of these are not voluntary refunds to customers. These are “chargebacks” (forced refunds) imposed by the credit card companies when the original purchase was made by a user not authorized to use the credit card. Unfortunately, these fraud events are common in online commerce, especially for sales of items that don’t need to be shipped to a real physical address. We use several techniques to detect and reject many fraud orders, but some get through undetected. We historically experience fraud rates lower than industry averages and much less than 1% of sales. The experience rates for different products often vary as the fraudsters sometimes seem to target specific products. These chargebacks come from the credit card companies day by day, normally several weeks or months after the original sale (after the cardholders have examined their credit card statements) and we normally record them in big batches. The items recorded in the last few days represent an accumulation of chargebacks over about two months. We are simply completing the accounting after not recording them for some time.

We ask developers in this forum to understand that MobiHand continues to work hard to provide services, get all of you paid and generate growing revenues. If something is not perfect, please do not interpret it to mean that we have given up or do not intend to get it right. Most developers with questions and concerns have addressed them directly to us in a businesslike manner, using the help tool inside their MobiHand account, and most concerns are resolved to their satisfaction with the one exception being late payments. We appreciate that most developers are not using payment delays as a reason to create more problems by inconveniencing customers or encouraging panic by the developer community. You should also know that MobiHand is not some giant corporate monster — it is a small technology company with real people who have provided outstanding service to customers, developers and website stores for seven years. As usual, businesses go through easy times and difficult times and the only way we know to get through difficulties is to continue to work. MobiHand is continuing to provide services and intends to pay every single dollar owed to every single developer and we have several initiatives underway that we believe will enable that.

Finally, please understand that we don’t read these forums everyday, we don’t intend to become regular participants and, if we are silent about issues, it is not because we don’t care. We are simply focused on running our business. Instead of engaging in debates, we are trying to serve the developer community and our mutual customers.

Thanks.

As of this writing, not much more is known…

P.S. To clarify some accusations levied against Tamoggemon Limited by a hysteric developer who will remain unnamed: we have not made any revenue off MobiHand for ages. We stand in no commercial relationship to MobiHand whatsoever.