Facebook’s Credits Virtual Currency Begins Testing Payment Issues Resolution Features
January 13th, 2010
| By Eric von Coelln | 6 Comments » |
While neither the full release of the Facebook Credits system nor the release of the full API to developers has yet to be announced, there have been a handful of games that have been testing the Facebook Credits integration.
As we reported back in mid-December, Happy Island, developed by CrowdStar, was the first game that exclusively used Facebook Credits for all in-game purchases. Recently, we’ve noticed that a “Payments Issues” link has been added to the footer of Happy Island, which provides a sneak peek at what options users will have to dispute payments for Credits going forward.
Selecting the Payments Issues link opens up a new dialogue box, where a user can choose to either get help in making a purchase using Facebook Credits or to dispute a past transaction:
If a user selects the first option, they see a very straight-forward dialogue box that opens with, at this point, just one pre-populated comment field (not a drop down) that the user can change, plus an additional text box where comments can be added:
If you wish to dispute a Facebook Credits purchase, then you are instead presented a screen with a pull-down box that allows you to select the purchase you want to dispute:
And then must describe why you are disputing the transaction:
This is a pretty simple billing resolution process, but since details about the credits program and a developer API has not been released yet, it provides a small insight into why they are building a payment operations team — in part, to deal with all these inquiries.
It also brings up the question of how this process will be balanced (if at all) with payment systems other than Facebook Credits. For example, (Lil) Green Patch by Playdom has purchases available by Facebook Credits and PayPal, yet the Payment Issues link (which is also integrated there) only deals with Facebook Credits – there is no direct link to deal with any disputes of payments done with PayPal. If Facebook continues to allow developers to use their own payment methods (including credit card, PayPal and offer systems), it would be doubtful that they’d want to lead customers who have issues with those payment methods to get mixed up with Facebook Credit-specific disputes.

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January 13th, 2010 at 11:43 am
[...] See the a break down of the user flow and more questions regarding what this means for developers at InsideSocialGames.com. [...]
January 14th, 2010 at 5:38 am
Social issues are substances that are indirectly or directly influence all members of a society and are well thought-out to be controversies, problems related to moral values or both.
January 26th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
[...] This month, the company has already made a push to hire for a new payments operation team, tested a payments resolution interface, and released Credits in more [...]
February 8th, 2010 at 5:34 am
[...] add up pretty quickly. I think one way that this may improve is when Facebook rolls out its own payment platform to streamline purchases as how Apple has done with apps on the [...]
February 12th, 2010 at 10:12 am
[...] can add up pretty quickly. I think one way that this may improve is when Facebook rolls out its own payment platform to streamline purchases as how Apple has done with apps on the [...]
February 18th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
[...] a product, Credits is still under development. A payments resolution feature only went live in January, and many other components of the system are still being worked on, [...]