Updates

Hello,

On Monday, some of you may be aware of the issues we faced with our payment provider, GoCardless. At 9am in the morning, they had emailed the companies inbox to say they had performed a review of our account, and found it in breach of their terms. After researching into this at later time, we found out that we fell under this breach of terms:

Any type of gaming:

• Gambling, betting, betting tips, prize draws or any form of lottery, or other related services.

Something which we should have checked beforehand, from the list of their prohibited services, found here.

Unfortunately, they immediately banned our account, meaning we could not access our dashboard, not even to consolidate or reconcile our monies. This also meant we could not manage refunds to customers. GoCardless ensured us that they would be refunding customers within 5-7 days, from around Thursday the 2nd April. Meaning we had lost money on all the draws both paid and those with shipping, since then.

I decided that I would still honour those draws, because I didn't feel it was fair to punish our users (some of who had paid) for a mistake that we had made.

All said and done, those people will receive their money back, and will also receive their wins too.

At the time, we quickly scrambled to integrate with Stripe, luckily we had already coded in most of the infrastructure at an earlier date, as we were planning to use Stripe before we integrated with GoCardless, but found GoCardless to be less intrusive to the payment flow. However, Stripe allows you to pay with Apple Pay, gPay and various other options (including bank pay), so may prove better. GoCardless offered us 120 days fee free. Stripe is charging us 20p per transaction, plus 1.5% of every payment, so we lose money instantly when you pay via card.

That being said, everything should be working OK now. This is likely a temporary solution, as we want to move to a payment provider that allows our type of industry no questions asked.

For the time being, please enjoy playing, and if you have any queries or questions in the meantime, please let us know via support.

Best,

Ben

Hi all,

Due to Easter Holidays, Post Offices will be closed and unable to scan in our parcels until Tuesday 7th April. Labels will still be prepared and parcels will still be packaged, all items due will be sent out on Tuesday unless otherwise notified.

Thanks,

Ben

Hello friends, users, players, collectors and more. Today we have pushed an update to our drop system allowing a number of different selections with drops.

A couple of new additions to our drop programming:

Multi-win drops

Limited-by-entries drops

Multiple drops on the same day (ie. premium and free)

The latter we have been working really hard on, because we realised that having premium drops somedays took away from our inherent core principles of one free card drop daily. So now, no matter what is dropping, you can guarantee one of them will be free to enter.

We have also pushed some bug fixes and smaller changes to the UI.

I wanted to take this time to thank everyone who has signed up, entered, played and helped report issues so far. You are the people that make the platform what it is. This months GoCardless take total was £204.10, which includes premium entries and shipping costs. When we take shipping costs of around £54 off that amount is considerably lower at around £150. In total, we spent around £40 on Hosting and Database costs this month. We also have given away over £520 in value. Around £110 revenue returns. When we then factor in the development costs it took to push out over 167 updates to the platform since we launched on 14th March, it's a considerable loss of nearly £400. We made a loss on every single premium drop.

But one thing remains, we started this project not knowing where it was going to take us. Simply with one mission - to give back to the community of Barrow and the more wider local areas. That we did. We created from scratch an MVP, and took it through to proof of concept. The fact that even took home any revenue this month is huge success for us.

We look forward to pushing more fun and antics this month, don't forget to like the Facebook page, sign up to the newsletter, and get in touch with us via Support in your dashboard, or by WhatsApping us directly (link on Facebook).

Thanks again, gotta catch 'em all!

Best,

Ben

Looky Collectibles Founder