PaiBoon Thai Android Dic App: I Need, I Want Buy! Dem No Communicate. Help, please.

[MrGaoMungGawn]

I have been attempting to purchase the Paiboon Publishing offering: "Talking Thai <> Eng Dictionary
for Android Smartphones and Tablets"

This is the site where they tell you how to purchase it through Google: http://word-in-the-hand.com/thaidictandroid_ov.html

The only source I have found for this android app is the google play app store.

The PROBLEM is that when I go to this store, I see that I need to use Google wallet, and to do this I need a credit card.

I do have a credit card that is valid, with plenty of money waiting to be spent.

Every time I type in the credit card number, and pertinent info for the card, card-holder, I get "INVALID CARD" error message.

Here is the Google Play store sight where this problem keeps happening:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wordinthehand.thaidict&hl=en

I have even used three separate computers trying to overcome this payment glitch/bug, so far without success.

I DO need this electronic dictionary yesterday, but now is still OK.

Does anyone have experience buying this android app, WHILE THEY are in THAILAND??

----------------

I am fairly certain that the price of 24.95USD is well worth the what you are getting.

I just cannot figure out why the publisher did not do their homework ages ago, and make this purchasing quagmire much more stable and easy, and intuitive.

BUT THEY DID NOT.

Perhaps someone affiliated with Paiboon publishing will see this and correct a very frustrating state of affairs with retail purchasing of this product.

Hopefully, someone at Paiboon might offer me a fast solution???

After looking at the various choices available to learners for an English-Thai-English romanized dictionary, the Paiboon's offering comes out first.

This is not only my opinion, but it is the opinion of the Assessment Specialist
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MCAS Mass Department of Education in the US) (I actually did write to their Specialist several weeks ago, and received a nice response, which told me that Paiboon is as good as they can find at the moment!)

So......I have contacted quite a few authorities looking for a better dictionary, and I can't find it yet.

Now, I am trying to buy Paiboon's offering, the price is not high, but their setup is creating purchasing havoc for me.

ANYONE AT ALL, who has experience with this, please provide some help to buy this software if you can.

THKS!

[eric67]

So what you're basically saying is that you don't really have a problem with the publisher of the app, but with Google Wallet who won't accept your creditcard.

Maybe contact Google and ask them what you should do (as they are the one responsible for processing all payments in the Google playstore, not the individual publishers)?

[SlyAnimal]

I have this app on my iphone, it's really good.

I'd say that the problem you're having, is probably that the region of your credit card and your google wallet/store region don't match.

As I had that problem in the past with the iphones app store when I changed my region to Thailand (Previously I had New Zealand, and a NZ credit card setup).

My solution, was to goto a kasikorn bank ATM and setup my Kasikorn bank debit card for online transactions. After which I didn't have any further problems.

Also another potential problem you might be having, is that if you are using a Thai card, some of them apparently don't work well with international transactions. However as I've had no problems using my card online, so I'd say try using a Kasikorn bank card if you have one (You need to enable internet/phone/electronic transactions at a Kasikorn Bank ATM first though, as the card needs to be linked to your phone).

[Chris Pirazzi]

Hello,

This is Chris Pirazzi from Word in the Hand, makers of the dictionary app along with Paiboon Publishing. Thanks for your kind words about our app.

I just heard about this Thaivisa post from another customer....I'm not sure who you tried to contact before, but we are happy to help in any way we can. You can send email any time to [email protected]

As the other helpful posters ont his thread have mentioned, it sounds like you are having issues getting through the payment system of Google Play Store and Google Wallet.

We can offer a few other suggestions that might help the purchase go through. These suggestions apply to any paid app on Google Play.

We have many non-Thais buying from Thailand every day so we can say it is common and possible to buy Play Store apps that way. I definitely apologize for the purchase frustration; believe it or not we also have the same frustration! As an Android app developer I'd love to be able to say that I can log in, find your purchase, and click a button to make it just go through. But sadly and surprisingly, Google gives us app developers almost zero visibility to, and control over, purchases in the Google Play Store. In fact, Google no longer even lets us app developers know the names or emails of our customers so that we may assist them, and now they only show the city or country of the customer! Google made this change with privacy in mind, but I don't think they considered the impact on sales support.

The purchase can fail at several levels, including at the Google Play Store level and at the level of your credit card company.

The first thing to do, even if the error message doesn't seem to warrant it, is to contact your credit card company and get a definitive answer on whether they have seen any purchase failures or not. If they did, then they can usually help you resolve the situation immediately. We have seen cases where folks traveled to Thailand but didn't tell their credit card companies, or their credit card companies flagged fraud for some other reason and all you have to do is tell them not to do so again for that particular vendor or for a particular time period.

If the credit card company didn't see anything, you need to contact the next layer of folks who have actual authority over and access to your purchase on the Play Store: Google Play Store / Google Wallet.

These seem to be the most relevant "contact us" links:

This one has a telephone link for Google Wallet where apparently they call you:

https://support.google.com/wallet/contact/general_c2c?ctx=ef

And this one for Play Store has an "Email Us" link at the very bottom and also says:

1. "For your protection, Google cancelled this order. The transaction was considered fraudulent."
   • If we suspect fraudulent activity, orders will be automatically cancelled to prevent unwanted charges on your account. If the issue persists, please let us know below so we can work on resolving the issue.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/topic/3365284?hl=en&ref_topic=3364672#contact=1&ts=3006597,3038563,3038916

When you contact them, of course the first thing they will do is blame your credit card company, but you will be armed with the fact that the credit card company did not see any purchase attempts.

There are a few things you can try without contacting Google, but they are long shots. You can try to make the purchase from a different network (e.g. different ISP) or a different physical location. If you happen to have access to a VPN or proxy server (e.g. through work) then making the purchase again through a proxy in the US or other Western country may resolve the problem that is making Google Play (or your credit card company) incorrectly conclude that fraud is going on. Or if you have a trusted friend/family in a Western country you can read the card info to them to make the purchase.

In the future we hope to free ourselves of Google Play. In addition to the purchasing hassle it causes for a small percentage of customers like you, the Google Play Licensing support is flaky and a small percent of customers lose access to the app when offline (though we did find workarounds for many cases of this and they are on our FAQ). We hope to kill two birds with one stone and switch to a more reliable system sometime next year.

Please contact us by email and we can try to help further.

[Langsuan Man]

The above post is exactly the kind of excellent support you get from this company. I contacted them about their product and got an answer almost immediately

Highly recommended company to deal with, Google and Google Play on the other hand are the pits

[MrGaoMungGawn]

The above post is exactly the kind of excellent support you get from this company. I contacted them about their product and got an answer almost immediately

Highly recommended company to deal with, Google and Google Play on the other hand are the pits

I agree with both your opinions stated here.

I like Google for search. I think they are going way off track when trying to sell things. They should just stick to advertising. Not order fulfillment.

I like Paiboon dic for Thai word lookup, and also, their Intermediate Thai book is quite good, as is the Beginners. But that is another subject.

I will try to get the Google Retail problem fixed for my own purchase.

[MrGaoMungGawn]

ONE OTHER VERY important FACT about the Paiboon electronic dictionary offering:

If you want to use it on your Windows laptop and also on your smart phone, THEN YOU WILL NEED TO PAY DOUBLE, once for one platform, and then AGAIN for the other platform.

What kind of nonsense is this?

What they should do is to charge once for the learner to use their product. They should charge once for the Windows or Linux copy for the laptop, and then they should issue a credit for the Android, or vis versa.

As it is now, I think their policy STINKS, because this is no way to treat students. Like CASH COWS wringing the last cent from their school budgets.

I hope that Chris will explain why they need to do this.

This makes no sense because it is the same individual using the product, but using it at different times, so this means that the copyright for one use per individual at any given time is protected.

However. I expect that Chris will give us some illogical song and dance telling us why the truth somehow does not apply to his company.

The truth never applies when one is making so much money at the expense of students, when this is in fact not necessary, and does not really make more money for this company in reality.

A fairly good product, I do not argue with this fact.

But the marketing policy, frankly, STINKS.

[Chris Pirazzi]

The truth never applies when one is making so much money at the expense of students, when this is in fact not necessary, and does not really make more money for this company in reality.

Well I can sympathise with your frustration and I'm a bit confused on whether you're saying we're making money or we're not making money, but I definitely see the root of the problem here: you are assuming the Thai dictionary market is profitable I can personally guarantee you that there are no skyscraper offices or junkets to the Bahamas and that we are happy if we can break even on our significant development costs.

Seriously though, I will respond here to everyone the same as I did to your similar private email.

To set some context here, we were discussing our policy of charging separately for each platform, which is described here (in the FAQ for each platform):

http://word-in-the-hand.com/thaidictandroid_faq.html#upgradeother

It says:

Do I get free lifetime upgrades to other platforms (e.g. Android/Windows)?

Can I get a discount for upgrades to other platforms (e.g. Android/Windows)?

Can I trade in my older version on another platform for this platform?

A: Currently there is no way to transfer a purchase or get a discount for a new purchase across platforms (e.g. between Windows, Apple iOS (iPhone/iPad), or Google Android phones and tablets).

One reason why we cannot do transfers or discounts is that Apple, Google, and PayPal are mortal enemies and they don't give us any way to transfer the licensing permission. Apple and Google also do not give us any way to offer discounts for individual customer purchases.

But there is another, more fundamental reason why we do not offer free license transfers or discounts: each time we have moved to a new platform (from Palm OS to Windows desktop to Apple iOS to Google Android) we had to completely re-write the app from scratch, because each platform uses a software development system that is completely incompatible with the previous platform. In some cases, we even had to rewrite our app in a completely different computer language! Unfortunately, platform designers like Microsoft and Apple and Google do this on purpose in a futile and counter-productive attempt at locking developers onto their platform, and this trend is almost certain to continue as new platforms emerge.

The net effect of this reality is that each time we move to a new platform, it incurs massive development costs (at least 3 and often 6 months of full-time software engineer labor).

The simple financial reality is that we need to recover those development costs so that we can continue to provide free upgrades for everyone on every platform, both existing and new! Because we have a large base of customers who also upgrade their devices to each new platform, we cannot fund continued development of all our supported platforms using only the purchases of new users on the new platforms. The numbers simply do not add up, and we would not be able to continue to support you if we did not charge across platforms.

We understand that from your point of view, you can only use one platform/device at a time, so it seems like you should only pay once. We hope you will understand that from our point of view, we need to pay for our programming time so we can continue to develop the app and add new features and new vocabulary for you and all our other users on all platforms.

You mentioned an example of a company, NJStar, which sells a Windows+Mac Chinese dictionary that offers one price for the two platforms. And I pointed out another example in the language space---the fantastic Chinese dictionary Pleco---that offers free upgrades across platforms starting with PalmOS, going through Windows Mobile, all the way to iPhone and Android. I definitely remember Mike Love, the very awesome creator of Pleco, lamenting the lack of new customers (specifically, new customers who download the free version then upgrade to paid) on iPhone and Android on his user forum, so I'm not sure if he still believes that the good will generated exceeds the loss of new sales.

Clearly, there is no industry-standard policy on upgrades. Ultimately, I think it just comes down to properly setting expectations for our customers.

Each time we add platforms (e.g. Palm to Windows to iPhone and Android to whatever comes next), we get about 10-20 emails requesting free or discounted upgrades. We point out our FAQ item, and then about 2-3 of those people end up being angry or passionate about wanting free upgrades, with the rest responding that they understand and are happy to support us further so that they can continue to get good support and upgrades. It is impossible to make everyone happy, but it is clear the vast majority of our customers see no problem with paying for upgrades because they see the quality of the product and the support that comes out of it. So I don't think it's a big crisis and I feel our main responsibility is to make the policy clear before the customer purchases the first time. That is why we included the item above in all of our product FAQs and we make it clear in our product descriptions that the free upgrades apply to the same platform.

There may be lots of examples of companies that offer free upgrades across platforms (although I think it is fair to say that most cross-platform software is not free across platforms), but you must also consider their different contexts. This is not song and dance; it's a basic financial reality. One major factor to consider is how much engineering cost it takes for the vendor to cross platforms. NJStar's example of Windows to Mac tends to be a lot easier (less costly) than iPhone to Android and definitely easier than desktop to mobile, but the actual cost depends on what the app does and the details of how the vendor wrote their older code. We and Paiboon Publishing spent more than 10 person-years of labor developing our dictionary dataset from scratch, and we spent a similar amount of time doing engineering for the various platforms. An even more important factor to consider is that the Thai learning market is miniscule, especially compared to Mandarin, and saturation is a real issue. The number of people who want to learn Thai seriously enough to spend $25 is tiny. We know that a huge percent of our customers move from platform to platform with us, and based on the sales curves we can surmise that we really are near or at the point of saturating the market (whereas saturation may be impossible for such a huge market as Mandarin learning), so we are not in the same financial boat as Pleco or NJStar. They always have room to grow, but we are selling to a very, very small group and we seem to be getting near to covering all of them that might buy. If we instituted a policy that lost us the majority of new sales on a new platform, we would be out of business immediately. That would be no good for our customers.

We want to keep adding more and more vocabulary and features and we believe this is the only financially viable way to do it. We present our offering to our customers with a clear description of the price, features, and upgrade policy and let our customers decide by purchasing or not purchasing. The vast majority seem quite satisfied.

[DavidHouston]

Excellent response, Chris.

[MrGaoMungGawn]

The truth never applies when one is making so much money at the expense of students, when this is in fact not necessary, and does not really make more money for this company in reality.

Well I can sympathise with your frustration and I'm a bit confused on whether you're saying we're making money or we're not making money, but I definitely see the root of the problem here: you are assuming the Thai dictionary market is profitable I can personally guarantee you that there are no skyscraper offices or junkets to the Bahamas and that we are happy if we can break even on our significant development costs.

Seriously though, I will respond here to everyone the same as I did to your similar private email.

To set some context here, we were discussing our policy of charging separately for each platform, which is described here (in the FAQ for each platform):

http://word-in-the-hand.com/thaidictandroid_faq.html#upgradeother

It says:

Do I get free lifetime upgrades to other platforms (e.g. Android/Windows)?

Can I get a discount for upgrades to other platforms (e.g. Android/Windows)?

Can I trade in my older version on another platform for this platform?

A: Currently there is no way to transfer a purchase or get a discount for a new purchase across platforms (e.g. between Windows, Apple iOS (iPhone/iPad), or Google Android phones and tablets).

One reason why we cannot do transfers or discounts is that Apple, Google, and PayPal are mortal enemies and they don't give us any way to transfer the licensing permission. Apple and Google also do not give us any way to offer discounts for individual customer purchases.

But there is another, more fundamental reason why we do not offer free license transfers or discounts: each time we have moved to a new platform (from Palm OS to Windows desktop to Apple iOS to Google Android) we had to completely re-write the app from scratch, because each platform uses a software development system that is completely incompatible with the previous platform. In some cases, we even had to rewrite our app in a completely different computer language! Unfortunately, platform designers like Microsoft and Apple and Google do this on purpose in a futile and counter-productive attempt at locking developers onto their platform, and this trend is almost certain to continue as new platforms emerge.

The net effect of this reality is that each time we move to a new platform, it incurs massive development costs (at least 3 and often 6 months of full-time software engineer labor).

The simple financial reality is that we need to recover those development costs so that we can continue to provide free upgrades for everyone on every platform, both existing and new! Because we have a large base of customers who also upgrade their devices to each new platform, we cannot fund continued development of all our supported platforms using only the purchases of new users on the new platforms. The numbers simply do not add up, and we would not be able to continue to support you if we did not charge across platforms.

We understand that from your point of view, you can only use one platform/device at a time, so it seems like you should only pay once. We hope you will understand that from our point of view, we need to pay for our programming time so we can continue to develop the app and add new features and new vocabulary for you and all our other users on all platforms.

Clearly, there is no industry-standard policy on upgrades. Ultimately, I think it just comes down to properly setting expectations for our customers.

Ultimately, and obviously, it comes down to not having enough competition in this sector. There are plenty of good Chinese dictionaries available for learning. But it was not until just 1950 or so we had the offering from Mary Haas.

We also need much more input from the research universities and governments if the private sector cannot do better than what you say that Paiboon is doing. I have not seen the electronic dictionary, but the bound version, the paper version, is poor quality in its binding and cover which falls off after little use, and it is missing very many entries that should be there if one is using this book at the high school level.

It is not that the Department of Education in Mass would not like a better dictionary than Paiboons. It is only that ONE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE.

Please RETHINK this policy which is very mistaken, and correct it.

It is only because you are the only suppliers of a half decent dictionary that you can get away with charging once for the android, once for the windows, and once for the linux version, if you even have one, and I had thought that you do.

This is utter NONSENSE that you are charging double just for PORTING to a different platform.

Basically, anyone that says otherwise knows nothing about computers, and also, probably not anything from shinola about dictionaries which are offered for learning other languages.

We need much more government support if there is none from the private sector.

NOW WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GIVE US the option to use other platforms at no extra cost?

[Langsuan Man]

You have been quite successful in how you have marketed so far, so I don't think the loss of MtGaoMungGawn business is going to impact your bottom line all that much

By his reasoning if I have a iPad, an Android Phone, and a Windows laptop I should be able to get three programs at once !

If I have an iPad then logically I would have factored the cost of software into my cost of ownership if I chose to buy a Android phone and didn't buy an iphone.

The consumer decides what platform they want to use, not the seller of software, especially when the software seller has to pay licensing fees to the stores that sells the software

[MrGaoMungGawn]

You have been quite successful in how you have marketed so far, so I don't think the loss of MtGaoMungGawn business is going to impact your bottom line all that much

By his reasoning if I have a iPad, an Android Phone, and a Windows laptop I should be able to get three programs at once !

If I have an iPad then logically I would have factored the cost of software into my cost of ownership if I chose to buy a Android phone and didn't buy an iphone.

The consumer decides what platform they want to use, not the seller of software, especially when the software seller has to pay licensing fees to the stores that sells the software

1. The consumer could decide, as you say, but only if there is a choice of two or more decent products to choose between.

2. There may not be enough Thai language learners to support this extra effort at this time.

3. Let us remember that there have been quite a few very good efforts from other people that have gone before Paiboon, AND these efforts have probably been of invaluable asstance to Paiboon in compliling all their Thai dictionaries. Such efforts were supported by the US government, including the work by FSI, and also the work by Mary Haas. There is much work ongoing that is "opensource" that relies on contrubutors which provide assistance at no cost.

4. I believe that the price charged for any port, windows, or linux, or android, is a fair price, especially considering the very good customer service that Paiboon seems to provide.

4a. I believe that the charging of customers a second time, or a third time, depending upon how many OSes the customer wants to run, is gouging, because the customer has no other alternative good choice.

5. I hope that the reserach universities, any interested governments, and private citizens and learners, will donate time and money to building an electronic dictionary, on-line similar to the OED, and on HDD, as well as bound versions. There are already on-line free Thai langauge dicionaries, but I, so far, have preferred using the hard bound copies and the paper copies.

5a. The only reason I have any significant interest in the electronic dictionaries is because the Paiboon Paper copy is falling apart, AND because the Paiboon Paper copy is missing many obvious entries, without which the whole book is frustrating to use.

6. Much more could be said about making comparisons between the Paiboon published dictionaries and those published for study of Japanese or Chinese, since there is no other Thai diciontary I know of that can be compared for quality and completeness....but that is not the subject of this Topic.

[MrGaoMungGawn]

Basically, it is like this, Chris:

1. You and your company should keep trying to make as much money as you can from your dictionary.

2. We users of dictionaries will keep trying to get the best dictionary at the lowest cost, in the most convenient format.

You do not need to worry about fcking with our expectations, and you can hire a Madison Avenue company to do this if your really wish, to change our reality.

Until you come out with a better solution which works at one price on all platforms, then I will not be interested in your electronic software.

And I will first be thinking about how to get a new copy of the Paiboon Thai dictionary, because mine is already falling apart after only a few short months of limited use.

Fix that, and then we have something to talk about.

So, it is a good thing that there was glitch in processing my impulse decision to buy your electronic dictionary.

[ohyesiam]

Wow, the dark clouds descended here didn't they.

I thought I would throw in my 2 cents worth. I grudgingly forked out the 25$ for the program after using the demo on my pc. I pouted for a while, and have never given up the feeling that I should have the desktop version as companion to my iOS version.

I do understand the argument from Word In Hand regarding relative cost and benefit in pricing decisions and agree that a customer should not expect a free addition for any platform he decides he wants next 'if it is device based'; frankly I think it is a ridiculous expectation from any customer.

I had thought a lot about this myself, and at one point thought a transfer credit for a platform change might be an idea. I realise though that too is just a self-serving concept because, let's face it, we're not exactly bringing the "old" model back to the supplier so he can exchange it. Once it's out there, it's out there and people are going to support the purchase of that new Gala-droid from the sale of their IOS device, which they are going to point out has a great Thai-English Dictionary on it already - read "free". Moral, ehtical, or otherwise. Ifthe product were server-based there might be room for an option like that though, I just never want to see that happen because a key to this application is it is onboard. No network required.

However a partnered desktop access could be effectively managed, I believe, through a network feature that crypto-key links the device over LAN or WIFI, or even a cloud solution.

This is involves some investment again, and then we do have to consider Chris's acknowledgement that the Thai-English market is relatively small and growth is small and unpredictable. He has said it plainly, it is not comparable to most other language markets - that translates to lower yield. We have to have some faith in the credibility of the people who bring this to us, otherwise why even consider the product? I'm sure they probably have mortgages too. I appreciate the professional and thorough response from Chris.

I personally am very - very pleased that I made this purchase; this dictionary has become invaluable to me over the past 3+ years. I use it daily in my relationship at home as well as situations of daily living and business conversations.The dictionary terms are wide and varied, and include many items that I have not been able to find anywhere else in context. Oh yes, context deserves a special consideration and this is also one of the keys to the value of the electronic version, offering varied contexts.

I probably won't buy the desktop version, I would like to see efforts made around the ideas I have suggested. I will buy the android version if I ever see the need to go to that platform, as with Windows tec. Heaven help me avoid that please!!! :-)

I encourage people to revisit the decision to skip this app based on anger about not getting more for free. If I have to, while sitting at my desktop. I can tap on my phone or ipad or whatever to look up a word, I can manage that. It is an excellent program and as the paperback has already been endorsed to be, the best I have found so far.

[Genericnic]

I live in Thailand and am studying Thai. I use Paiboon's Talking Thai dictionary daily. It is the most expensive app I have on my iPad and the most used. Nicely, one copy works on both my iPhone and my iPad. (does it do that with Android phones/tablets too?) Having it on the iPhone is handy when I am out and about and need to communicate with words I don't currently know. The spoken language feature is great since my pronunciation leaves a bit to be desired at times.

But now I am seriously considering switching to an Android phone and tablet. One of the factors in making the decision was the availability of Talking Thai. I still want to see it in action on an actual Android phone but if it is as good as it is on an iPhone I'll be very happy. Will I pay again to get it on the new machine? Sure. As noted, I use it every day. I have had my current version for about 2 years so it has cost me about $0.035 per day and that cost per day decreases with every day I have it.

If I had one wish, it would be that the dictionary was available as a desktop app for OS X.

Keep up the good work Chris.

David