The life of being optional.

First, a primer. MacHeist is a program that gives you a bundle of software for a cheap price. The premise of the MacHeist is they start off giving you a couple software packages, and as more and more people buy it, more software becomes “unlocked” when certain benchmarks are met.

I’ve never participated in a MacHeist before this year. This was due to past MacHeist’s either offering software I didn’t want, or already had. This year, they’re offering World f Goo, Cro Mag Rally, WireTap Studio, and a few other packages that interest me. Just the retail price of Goo and Cro Mag make the $39 for the package a steal.

So I (figuratively) threw down my credit card and porked up the $39. After I hit the “complete purchase” button, I was presented with a blank, white web page. If I tried to refresh, I got the error that it would resend my request. Not wanting to have my card authorized for 2 $39 charges, I declined this offer. I waited around on the blank page, like the sucker I am, for more than a few minutes, hoping something would display. Inside another tab, I was refreshing my Gmail to see if a confirmation email would show up. It didn’t. I checked my credit card account and, sure enough, there was the charge for $39. So I fired off an email to the support team at MacHeist, hoping they would get back to me and fix it all.

That was April 1.

After 48+ hours with no response, I sent another email to their sales team. These emails describe what happened during the order process, provide them with the charge details from my bank, and ask that things be resolved at their eariiest convenience. This last email was sent about 12 hours ago and I still have no response. So I’m sitting here with $39 charged to my card, but nothing to show for it.

This is a bad customer service fail for MacHeist. I *really* wanted to like the package. But this just leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth. I’m afraid to do the order again, fearing the same would happen again. So instead, I’ll just wait a few more days for a response from MacHeist, if nother happens by then, it’s off to my credit card’s dispute department to get this rectified. t really shouldn’tis difficult to get a response from someone at the other end. It makes the entire entity come across as sophmoric.

MacHeist, next time around, rather than be concerned with putting Chris Pirillo, Veronica Belmont, and Lisa Bettany on Ustream to launch it, make sure you have a way to respond to problems in a timely manner. Any kind of communication at this point would be nice. Truthfully, I have no idea that my emails have actually been received by anyone. They have no autoresponse set up to notify people their email came across the tubes OK and give the customer an expectation as to when to expect a response, etc. These small little things make a huge difference when dealing with a customer. Just a head’s up.

P.S. If anyone from MacHeist ever sees this, my emails came from HOMERJ79 at GMAIL dot COM. KTHXBAI.

Update – 04/05/09 1:40AM

This morning I got my email from MacHeist confirming my order and letting me download everything. It still took longer than it should have (with no communication from MacHeist at all), but it’s at least rectified. I still stand behind my claim that they need to be more proactive towards these problems.