| I recently bought Parallels, and it wasn't much better. From the email I sent them (after I finally found an email address): - When I arrived on the checkout page (from the link in the nice email you sent), you had tacked on a $8 digital backup fee. That is a complete bullshit charge, and you added it by default with no explanation as to what it was, or why I would want it. It was also not particularly obvious whether or not I could remove said add-on. It is a shameless, low class, money grab. - I switched my pricing from USD to CAD, and you added $10 despite the two currencies trading at parity (I quickly swapped back, and just paid in USD). Another shameless, senseless money grab. - You require my name, home address, email address, and phone number in order for me to purchase downloadable software via Paypal. You do not need any of that information. You want it so that some tool in marketing can have pretty powerpoints. It should be optional. (Making it required simply requires me to make up information; a waste of both our time.) - The “send me email spam” checkbox was checked by default. The only reason for this is to get permission to spam people too lazy to pay attention to the checkout. It’s another tasteless scam formulated by a greedy, customer hostile executive tool. - After purchasing, I entered my serial number, and was informed that I would have to register to receive updates to the software I just purchased. I cannot explain to you how incredibly asinine I find that policy. - The registration process once again required information I didn’t want to give you (requiring me to give you fake information) - After registering, and confirming my registration via email, and entering my email/password combo into the application I was told that I had given invalid credentials, and to try again. (I hadn’t. I’m pretty good with copy/paste.) So I guess NO UPDATES FOR ME? |
This is actually less for marketing purposes and more for running anti-fraud analysis, which is a key consideration when you sell software at their scales. When I write my (totally legitimate) Japanese address and phone number combined with my American credit cards, it often ends up in an order getting held for purgatory for 48 ~ 72 hours until I can point them to the resolutions for the last four orders I did through them and the fact that none were chargebacks for being stolen credit cards.
Steam also does something similar. You can thank your local pirate.
The digital backup fee is scamtastic, and (shockingly) isn't the worst thing they have pulled over the last few years (that would be automatically adding rebill fraud 'coupon booklet' subscriptions to the orders). They split the fee $7 to DR and $1 to the software publisher, which means that for sales of $50 software they make substantially more from that addon than for the software itself at almost all of their (myriad) pricing schemes for the core DR payment processing experience.