Adobe.com: An Underwhelming Buying Experience
So it’s time to upgrade some Adobe products. No, the reviews haven’t been positively glowing, but I do generally like their products… I’ve been using Adobe and Macromedia’s online stores for as long as they’ve existed, and today’s experience has been my worst to date.
After selecting products, adding them to the cart, and entering finanical vitals, it tells me this:
Thank you for visiting the Adobe Store.
We are currently reviewing your order!
Apparently Nitrozac and Snaggy weren’t far-off with their Mortgage Your Home Edition… This is now a process, not a transaction.
You will receive an email within the next business day confirming the status of your order.
Your credit card will not be charged until your order has been processed.
WTF? I thought this was ecommerce. I give you credit card info, you give me downloads. Now. Not tomorrow. Not later today. Now.
The only waiting should be for the hundreds of megabytes of data I have to download.
As with Microsoft and its Office suite, Adobe needs to realize that it’s competing with free products.
In some cases that means open source (e.g. The GIMP and the many open source Office alternatives). It often means their own software (”is CS2 good enough? Nah. Wait for CS4…”).
When companies like Adobe or Microsoft or Sony make the purchasing experience painful in this way, who do they think they’re hurting?
Michael Said,
February 14, 2008 @ 10:59 pm
Tell me about it. Twice now i’ve tried buying stuff through the online store and received this message. The first time they denied my order and I had to call it in.
Fashion Photographer Said,
June 18, 2008 @ 5:45 am
I am in the same boat - bought CS3 online today, and got that message. Boy was I ticked, I wanted to download my stuff and get to work - oh well, maybe tomorrow. Might as well have waited for the disks to ship…