Archive for February, 2008

I’m hate to publicly gripe about anything, but after my experience with the Adobe store I’m so upset that I have to say something. So to preface this, I already own licenses to Adobe software, create very high profile projects with it, but I wanted to buy another full license for CS3 web premium (on Mac). Yesterday, I went online to purchase it, made my order and then get a response that the order is pending. No where before this last state do I recall being informed my purchase was going to take time to process. So problem here is that I’m onsite with someone and I want to run the software now on a specific OS installed on my box. I figured it wasn’t so bad, since I can do builds of the code with Ant etc. and don’t need the Flash IDE immediately or can run a different OS. Time passes, then I get an email saying that my purchase has been declined. Since I’m using a business credit card with a very high limit, this made no sense. Therefore I tried to make the purchase again. Same thing, pending. At this point, I’m wondering what is going on. Adobe has online live chat, so I opened a conversation only to find that the person is a sales person, not a customer rep. Great. At the same time I had made a call to customer service, which finally got answered 2o minutes later by someone in India. I gave him all my info and had him check the order. He mentions that orders above a 1000 dollars have to be completely approved before processing them. Ok, I can understand that, but a little forewarning goes a long way to my reaction. Then he goes on to say that I should get a response in the form of an email about my purchase. Super, this is what the other email had told me. I mentioned the previous purchase I had attempted and the outcome. I asked him to check that order#. He said I had no other orders, but I insisted and gave him the # which I had saved. So he checked it and after 5 minutes responds that my bank turned it down. To that I told him it’s a credit card company not a bank and asked him if we could just process the order over the phone, since a card can be simply called in. His response was you will get an email. Finally, I was getting frustrated and asked for a supervisor. So I waited on the phone for 15 minutes, and then they hung up on me.

So yes, I hate to say it, but Adobe’s Store sucks. I say it in hopes that maybe the comment will improve it. I love Adobe, but you can’t put your customers through that kind of ringer. My outcome, I’m don’t have the software running on the OS I want it to be on, so I’m not going to be as efficient. I’m also still waiting on the “email approval”, but I’ll probably end up going to a physical store like Apple and buying it.

[UPDATE] – My order magically went through finally as it says I can go download it, but it I go into my account and it still says pending. It’s leaving a bad taste in my mouth .

[UPDATE AGAIN] – So I never followed up on what happened, but I finally got my software. A representative from Adobe personally followed up with me and promised to  address some of the issues I pointed out. I totally appreciated that, and hope that my gripe will save some others pain in the future.