Frankly, Element 5 is just about the worst online payment processing I have seen in many years. I'm rather fed up with them, there's no reason for them to be this totally useless at the core of what they supposedly DO and I honestly think they're costing you customers. I'm trying to get you to take my money and Element 5 is making it unnecessarily difficult. I love your product, but I hope you haven't signed some sort of long-term contract with them because I honestly think you should tell them off and get a real company that knows what the hell they're doing!!! Maybe you could get Digital River to switch you over to another one of the countless payment processing companies they've apparently acquired without unifying or improving whatsoever; just find one that doesn't feel the need to kill foreigners on the exchange rate, nor:
- unnecessarily hold Visa and PayPal payments for processing for some undetermined 4- or 12- or 24- or 48- (what they tell you depends on what payment method you use and what planets are in alignment that day) hour period for an unknown reason. (Surely it would be RETARDED to wait for an electronic purchase until a physical employee person eyeballs each already confirmed payment...?) When someone buys something online that will be delivered through email it should be INSTANT, and at the absolute LEAST if it's not going to be instant it should TELL YOU THAT BEFORE YOU BUY IT,
- then send an email with a link telling you to login to view your order status, even though you didn't actually register for an account since the registration step said it was optional, so you have to use the password reset process in order to get into the account they apparently made anyway and expected you would do that for (so why make the step optional then),
- then when you go through that reset process and log into your account, you find the PayPal payment you just put through must have disappeared into the ether because there's NO order number there at all, it tells you that you have no active orders, and sure enough you go check your PayPal and there's no transaction listed there, and you'd like to cancel it to make sure you don't get charged if you try another payment method, which their email says not to do, but you can't cancel an order if it's not listed under orders on your account,
- then you put a second order through, and pick Visa this time, assuming the idiotic hold period is just for PayPal (spoiler alert: nope. Actually with PayPal it told me it'd "normally" be within 4 hours, but with Visa it told me it'd "normally" be within 12 hours. Not sure if the difference is because of the two different payment types or because the order attempts were 45 min. apart and in the meantime they went home for the day or to bed wherever they operate or something)... No such luck, but that second order at least DOES show up in my account, so at least I know I'll be getting the product I ordered, eventually, when they feel like it...
Come on guys. You're better than this. If the hold-up for going from payment submission to license key acquisition is on your end, you desperately need to automate that process like
EVERYone else in the e-commerce world does. But I'm pretty sure, since the "NO YOU MUST WAIT" emails come from Element5, that it's just that they are tools. Either way, if I didn't adore MediaMonkey, I sure as hell would have given up after my PayPal submission evaporated and I would have instead switched to another product. You can't count on all of your potential customers to be this loyal.
