email verification before checking out !

[ramystyle]

This is important as if the new user misstypes his email address, he will never get the info.
This also helps preventing fraudulent orders !

Anyone agrees ?

[XN-Matt]

I'd say no to this. As you are basically stopping people from purchasing your services. They will get annoyed and go elsewhere.

These days, even if they do enter the right address - it still may not be received so what would you do then?

You have the customers phone number - call them if the address bounces. Nothing like being pro-active when you have new customers.

BUT on the spin from this - I would love to see verification before someone can change their email address.

[ramystyle]

i disagree ! When you have over 10 orders a day, and at least 2-3 false emails a day, you cannot go and call each one of them knowing that most of them are fraudulent.
Whenever you have a good order (Not fradulent), you have the user emailing you saying he did not receive his info. The time and effort this takes is considerable.

If WHMCS gives the option for those who wants to enable email verification upon signing up, it would save us many hassles, cut fraudulent orders from the beginning (yes.. Some orders are fraudulent and not detected by Maxmind and have invinted email addesses), and gives you the peace of mind that your users will get the correct info to the right inbox and not to worry about their typos.

XN-MAtt, you are not stopping people from purchasing your services. At the end of their order, after the signup page, a simple page saying "Your order is almost complete. Please login to your email and verify your address by clicking the verifications link. " That's it. It won't take more than 1 min to do and users are already used to this sort of methods.
Take this forum for example.. Didn't you have to verify your email to be able to post? Did this make you run away ?

Any other comments are welcome..

[Zorro67]

Another possible way, which might be an acceptable compromise for both of you, would be for people to re-enter their email in another box (at the same step), much as they would a password. Then is there is a discrepency, (an existing) java routine can easily flag an error .


Of course, this doesn't stop people from copying from email1 & pasting into email2.
But with a description line to tell peole why they should TYPE their email, i would think that you'd get greater than 90% compliance.

[XN-Matt]

i disagree ! When you have over 10 orders a day, and at least 2-3 false emails a day, you cannot go and call each one of them knowing that most of them are fraudulent.
Whenever you have a good order (Not fradulent), you have the user emailing you saying he did not receive his info. The time and effort this takes is considerable.

We do get that order volume but in our 4-5 years in this business... we must have had a handful (no more than 10) people enter their email address incorrectly.

XN-MAtt, you are not stopping people from purchasing your services. At the end of their order, after the signup page, a simple page saying "Your order is almost complete. Please login to your email and verify your address by clicking the verifications link. " That's it. It won't take more than 1 min to do and users are already used to this sort of methods.
Take this forum for example.. Didn't you have to verify your email to be able to post? Did this make you run away ?

Am I buying something? No. Completely different. And yes, it may take more than 1 minute to do.

Alot of companies, be it free or otherwise use stuff like Unknown sender delays, or greylisting. Yahoo and many of the companies that use filtering devices would be waiting more than 1 minute - I can assure you.

[othellotech]

having them type the email twice at signup would be *VERY* handy

the number of people who cannot type seems to grow every day, with letter transposition being extremely common ...

[ramystyle]

Othellotech I agree with you ! having them type the email twice at signup is one way !
Having them verifying their email address is another good way as well :P

I'm not asking this to be implemented. I'm only asking that we would be given the option to enable or disable the option to let new customers verify their emails.

[NetworkOfHosting.com]

There IS a reason why the >> VAST << majority of all sites (from majors (yahoo, google, myspace, etc.) to minors verify the email address by sending a verification email.

THERE IS A REASON.

To ignore this reason is like not putting a radio in most automobiles.

NOH

[othellotech]

There IS a reason why the >> VAST << majority of all sites (from majors (yahoo, google, myspace, etc.) to minors verify the email address by sending a verification email.

You'll find thats because these people often require you to opt-in to their junk email, or the cr@p they're providing you wth is free so it acts as a "weed-out"

Verification of emails when you're *purchasing* something is not the norm, and IMHO unnecessary - which is why the biggest shops in the world dont require you to do it.

[NetworkOfHosting.com]

??

We're signing up at ebay.com right now - After getting all of our registration information, Lo and beholdish! LOOK:

"Confirm your identity
Registration with eBay is free, but we need to verify your identity with a credit or debit card. This helps keep eBay a safe place to buy and sell."

And the next page:

EBAY:
Just one more step!
We have sent an email to your address [email protected].
In the email message from us, click the "Activate Now" link to confirm your registration.

See now, they go a bit beyond email - and I'm not even purchasing yet.

And then theres my favorite: paypal.com - recently jumped through all kinds of hoops and then they wanted to know my kid's social security number when I added a bank account.

Love their ploy:
We loaded our paypal.com with a nice sum with no problem.
No ID to load it.
Later, we wanted it back, then:
"We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party."
There was no third party.
All the ID in the world to get MY money... after they had collected years of fees.

And when I called them, I got a constantly changing story as to what was going on with holding our money.

All after I loaded my account with a nice sum, thus enabling them to hold on to it.

Finally got it straitened. Kind of ruined my holiday. Had they asked for all of that info upfront, I would not have been blind-sided when I least expected it when there was no apparent reason for them to do that other than the fact that I was now processing some pretty numbers.

WEEE!

One of *THE* "biggest shops in the world"

STANDARD Business for many...

I deal with it on a commercial basis daily across the net

NOH

[dkent]

I'm against email verification, sorry.

My reason is due to the added work that the client has to do, and I believe that the clients time at your site should be as easy as 1-2-3. There should be a "confirm email" field instead so the client cannot mistype it, therefore this will solve the problem.

[NetworkOfHosting.com]

I can see it from you guys point of view too.

The popularity of our VPN service causes us to spend way too much time weeding out garbage.

I mean, whmcs has a feature to check if the email address is from a FREE email service (by going to dnsstuff), yet I have 46 bogus orders for @mailinator.com (xxx@, kwww@, 123@, screwyou@). 3 are legitimate orders.

For a week we didn't know aol.com was bouncing emails back because it didn't like something about our server and no aol user complained that they weren't receiving emails, which contained instructions on getting their key files by the way.

It's just the way it is for us I guess...

NOH

[Host4u2]

It's just the way it is for us I guess...
NOH

Aye, it is what it is. Scammer's scenarios change quickly, and the resolves change. We do what is best for us... There are many great answers, but each one we adopt adds another hoop for the visitor/client to jump through. If we were able to cover all of the angles, it would be only for a day... there would be another to follow. Just need to play the percentages using what works best for where needed most. Do what you can, and accept what you cannot. The honest pay for the ways of the dishonest

If I had the full answer I'd be very wealthy!

"It's just the way it is for us I guess..."

[sol2010]

I am plus 1 for email verification.

step 1 - sign up

step 2 - verify email

Done

[strausmann]

Also +1 here