Payment Problems to be Resolved Soon

Dear customers,

Our humble apologies for the payment processing issues that NDS-Gear has had for about a month now – this has led to a lot of head scratching at our end and no doubt for many of our customers as well. It’s part of our customer service ethos to keep customers well-informed, so we’re posting this notice for the benefit of our customers so that you can understand the situation.

Our payment processor has unfortunately had issues processing both Visa and MasterCard payments since the 6th of October, 2011. This wasn’t a problem for NDS-Gear specifically, but a problem for the entire payment processor – and their thousands of clients worldwide. Since this date, we have been able to process American Express and Diner payments, as well as any bank-account funded payments (through our payment processor’s service). Obviously, though, this is a much, much slower process compared to the normal credit card checkout!

The reason NDS-Gear have not looked to many alternate processors for a ‘quick fix’ goes as follows:

PayPal (which is who we get a lot of e-mails about), since being acquired by eBay, does not allow the sale of game cartridges, even if blank and with the legal and usage disclaimers we have on our website. In addition, there are lots of seller-related security issues with PayPal that make it a horrible service to use from the point of view of a business, so we are unable to look at them for a solution. Similar security issues (and a lack of customer support) exist for Google Checkout.

As an addendum to the above, please note that while we recognise some customers will unfortunately be shopping elsewhere until these problems are resolved – any store claiming to use PayPal or Google Checkout are operating illegally, and your money could get trapped in a frozen account. Steer clear of these vendors at all costs (most tend to be Asia-based).

This was and continues to be a horrible blip for us going into the holiday season, but we’re currently hoping our existing processor is back up for credit card processing by the end of the first week of December (no guarantees but hopefully). In addition, we’re working towards a more long-term global solution that will allow us to constantly take payments without interruption, and with back-up systems in place as well. This won’t come into effect until a bit later unfortunately, probably not in time for Christmas orders but in time for 2012 and post-Christmas orders for anybody who would like a card for a shiny new DS or 3DS console.

In the mean time, the status of orders on NDS-Gear are as follows:

• Orders funded by bank transfer through the payment processor, OR American Express cards, are still going through as normal. If you would like to purchase from NDS-Gear, for now it is still indeed possible to fund via a bank account and make a purchase as long as you’re not located in one of the countries listed below.
• Visa and MasterCard payments are currently unable to be processed (ETA about a week, but we can’t be 100% sure).
• Due to regional bank issues, payments from the U.K., Australia and Japan cannot currently be processed.

We’d just like to extend a hand and say a massive thank you to everybody who’s shown support and patience at this time. We’re incredibly sorry that this has inconvenienced you and we’re working hard to make sure that an excellent long-term solution is in place when we come back. After all, no multimedia card store to our knowledge is in business now that was in business in 2007, except us! We pride ourselves always in our customer service and support, and we hope that this message goes a way to explaining the recent problems we’ve had.

As always, please e-mail any suggestions, comments or support, to sales@nds-gear.com. Many thanks once again for your continued support and patience.

All the best,
The NDS-Gear Team