Dear Adobe: Seriously. WTF?

August 29, 2008 @ 9:49 am · Filed under Adobe, Rants

Time for another copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3, from the people who brought you Dreamweaver CS3 (which was no different from Dreamweaver 9 except that you paid for it, again, and it was slower and –if it’s even possible –buggier than ever).

After suffering through the Flash-based Adobe store (kill me now), I give them my credit card number, and wait for the transaction to be processed.

I get a nice screen telling me that

We are currently reviewing your order.

You will receive an email within the next three hours confirming your order if you placed your order within North America business hours.

Wow. Do they have Adobe Gnomes who manually review each order to determine the customer’s worthiness?

Okay, calm down. It’s just Adobe letting you know who’s in charge. They’re a little passive-aggressive; it’s only natural given all the Adobe Love on the net these days.

Then the email arrives. Three hours becomes “within the next business day”, which would be FOUR DAYS FROM NOW (it’s the Friday before the Labour Day weekend).

You will receive an email within the next business day confirming the status of your order.

It’s ecommerce, people; we’re not rigging an election here.

5 Comments »

  1. Jason McClelland Said,

    August 29, 2008 @ 11:45 am

    Hi Christopher,

    My name’s Jason McClelland, and I’m the business development manager for Adobe’s online stores.

    I’m sorry to hear about your order issue- sounds like something set off a warning in our fraud detection systems. I’ve asked my colleagues in Finance and Customer Care to urgently look into your issue, and I’ll get back to you shortly with either the fix or details on what the hold up is.

    Best,

    ~j

  2. Jason McClelland Said,

    August 29, 2008 @ 11:47 am

    Forgot to mention- I’d asked the Finance and Customer Care folks to look for orders under the name “Christopher Mackay”; please let me know if we should be looking for a different name or e-mail address.

    ~j

  3. Chris Said,

    August 29, 2008 @ 1:18 pm

    Thanks, Jason; I’ve gotten my serial number this afternoon.

    You know, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Fraud trigger, eh? Interesting.

  4. Jason McClelland Said,

    August 30, 2008 @ 11:42 am

    Thanks for the update- glad to hear your order went through.

    Yeah, fraud detection is a never-ending cat and mouse game, and unfortunately some times it seems to get perfectly valid people like you. :( We’re working on cleaning up the user experience so you at least have some idea of what’s going on.

    Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

    Best,

    ~j

  5. Christopher Mackay Said,

    August 30, 2008 @ 3:28 pm

    The best thing to do to Adobe’s online store would be to switch it from Flash to HTML. How hard could *that* be? ;) It defeats too many browser-level controls (e.g. Opening new tabs or windows), and some links haven’t worked in Safari (not sure that’s still true).

    This only furthers the perception that Adobe treats Mac customers as second-class citizens; something Macromedia was in the habit of doing, too. But that has more to do with the frequent lack of feature- and price-parity of software (specifically bundles) that offer Mac users less for the same price.

    But that’s not your beat, is it?

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