This evening (one week since my first attempt), I was successfully able to sign up at Blinksale.
During the week, I received two e-mails from Blinksale support:
- “Sorry, we think this is our problem. We’ll have someone get in touch.”
- “Actually, the problem is with your credit card.”
Since I use this card quite regularly for all my business purchases, I’m quite sure that the card is fine. Additionally, it did work when I signed up on today – so I’m guessing they must have fixed something internally. Blinksale support never let me know that anything had been changed mind you, I just decided to give it one more shot before I gave up – and it worked.
I was pretty much willing to forgive the sign-up issues. After all, I know how hard it can be launching a web based service that becomes rather popular. Once I was in, the first impression was pretty good.
Unfortunately, as I explored the application for a few hours, I ran into some things that will likely cause me to cancel my subscription before I ever actually send an invoice. Here are the notes I took during my exploration:
- Application layout is clean and simple – good use of web standard navigation in a web application.
- Where are the recurring invoices?
- If I can’t create a recurring invoice, surely I should be able to duplicate an old invoice – right? That doesn’t seem to be an option either.
- Why do I have to make up an invoice number for each invoice? Isn’t that something software is supposed to do for you?
- Why can’t I choose from previously entered line items when creating an invoice?
- Blinksale offers RSS feeds and iCalendars (yay!), but these are only
protected
- It only took me about 2 hours to add my customers and customize my templates w/ my colors and logo – pretty good job they did with this stuff.
- How do I export my data for my own archives/records/tax purposes/etc.? Not very “web 2.0”.
- If I cancel my account, all of my data will be immediately deleted:
Your account and all of its invoices, client records, and other information will be deleted immediately.
um, I’d really like a copy for my records first.
Do I think Blinksale has the potential to be a great application? Yes, I do. They’ve already made it elegant and enjoyable to use – that is the often the hardest part of building a web application.
Unfortunately, the current feature set is inadequate for even my meager invoicing needs1 (I do ~5/month). Combine that with the lack of security for my data (public RSS feeds and iCalendars) and the inability for me to own my data, and I’m just not comfortable actually using the service.
As a mentor of mine once told me when I showed him a project I was working on (and thought I had completed):
Looks good… I look forward to seeing it when it’s finished.
My opinion is that they’ve come to market a little before they’re ready and created a classic “going to market too early” situation.
In a way, they did the hard part. They convinced me that I need to improve my invoicing situation and that I’m willing to pay a monthly fee for that service – they turned me into a customer. But since I’ve decided I have a need for this type of service and they aren’t meeting it, I’ll probably go ahead and sign up with another service instead in the next week or so.
Unless my experience with that service goes very badly, I probably won’t give Blinksale another chance2 because I will have committed my data to that service instead (even though I like the Blinksale interface better than any others I’ve seen).
Would be interested in knowing who you finally decide to go with. I shyed away from blinksale for many of the same reasons as you did. Ended up with billingorchard/authorize.net. Very pleased with them in general, but I have to be honest, their support has been sluggish to respond at times. The good part to that is I haven’t needed to write support for anything since about 3 days after I signed up.
Follow-up on Online Invoicing
I’ve done some in-depth exploration into several other online invoicing systems since deciding Blinksale wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I set up my client list complete with recurring payments in each of these systems – really tried …
Hi Alex,
I’m glad the card finally went through for you, and I’m sorry we weren’t able to solve the problem more quickly. The bottom line is that we don’t process credit cards ourselves; it’s done through a trusted third-party (this is good for you and for us — more secure and less hassle).
The problem with that arrangement, of course, is that when their system rejects a card number (for whatever obscure reason) we don’t have a way to brute-force the card on your behalf. Yours is the only US card I’ve heard of having these problems, so it seems you got caught on some kind of an unfortunate hiccup in the system.
Again, sorry for the inconvenience and we hope you’ll take another look at Blinksale in the near future.
John Marstall
Blinksale Support
Hi John. My experience running an online service has been that only one out of ~25 people experiencing a problem will actually take the time to let you know about it. I might have been a random case, or I might be representing a number of people who are having the same problem, but haven’t taken the time to e-mail.
Seems as though many of your must haves have been added since your bad experience… I’ve been enjoying it.
I’m glad it’s improved over the last year. As I noted above:
This is exactly what happened, and I signed up with Vebio (see follow-up posts on Vebio in this blog). As a result I’ve been using all the features I wanted for the last year – but not with Blinksale.