tenpastmidnight blog

Making hay while the sun shines

Buying Contribute is a real trial

I'm trying to buy Macromedia Contribute on-line at the moment as one of my clients uses it and my trial version has run out. Macromedia have made their shop amazingly annoying. It's rather slow, which is the first annoyance. Every time I change page while I hunt around for the best deal it seems to add the product to my shopping basket again, which is more annoying. They won't let me buy it in dollars rather than Sterling, which is going to cost me an extra £20 at current exchange rates, even though they're not actually going to send me anything physically.

(Pause while I re-start everything from scratch.) And now the UK store can't process my credit card, even though I've tried three ways of putting my name in.

In fact, bollocks to it. I'll dig out my old PC and install the trial version on it. If Macromedia can't code their site properly, I can't be bothered to buy their software through it. I'm sure Amazon will be able to ship it to me without problems, I just need to do the work with it today so I need the trial version again.
Comments:
Sorry this wasn't smooth for you, hmm, let's see... I'm not sure how to get items mysteriously added to a cart by visiting a page, but it should be easy to remove them if so... that "local currency" thing is de rigeur online, although you can have them do conversions offline if you wish (see "Intl. Store FAQ", http://www.macromedia.com/go/16718 ),,, the "credit card refused" thing can happen a few ways, but the main way is listed in "Payment FAQ" ( http://www.macromedia.com/go/16723 ) with a discrepancy with the shipping address. I know there's desire for a strict globalization thing, but there's also the counterpressures towards local economies too... hard to find a balance for every viewpoint on this one.... :(

Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support
 
Thanks for replying John,

I changed my address to match the one my credit card address is registered to (i.e. my parents where I can be sure someone is in for things that get delivered.) I did have a problem a couple of months ago when LloydsTSB brought in an extra system called 'Clicksave' but I didn't see anything showing that Clicksave was being used in the transaction process anywhere.

I could remove the extra items, but when I visited other pages more were added. Also I wasn't interested in the extra disk, but it was re-added when an extra copy of Contribute was added in to the basket.

I've revisited the site today and can't get it to do the same adding-products strangeness. All of this is using Firefox, but today in on a PC and yesterday on a Mac (both v1.0) The only oddness I got today was a blank page after clicking on 'United Kingdom' on the map, but a refresh got me the content. I didn't try getting further than the insert-your-credit-card page as I've got Contribute coming from Amazon now.

When I next buy ColdFusion I'll go for the buying offline via the call centre - thanks for the info.
 
"I've revisited the site today and can't get it to do the same adding-products strangeness...."ah, that must be it... store must've had a hangover from New Year's Eve, I guess.... ;-)

I'm glad you were finally able to do what you wanted, even though it took an extra sidetrip. Folks from Macromedia Customer Service were working last week, but over holidays is often a frequent time for snafus, true.

jd/mm
 
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