So often you are ‘heads down’ and busy doing your thing that you forget how much a few little things can mean to someone.  Later in the day, I performed another small data export for the same client and got this [click on image to zoom in] :

She sure knows how to get results doesn’t she?  It made MY day too!

Photo by RavenHawk via Flickr

What is with the sales team at the Australian Taxation Reporter magazine?  Over the years, they keep repeatedly calling me, and when we try and tell them we are not interested in their product, they start getting really, really pushy and downright rude.

For the first time in my life yesterday, I slammed down the phone on one of their sales reps when she absolutely refused to take ‘No’ for an answer.  I tried to be polite and to explain my reasons, but these guys must have the mother of all script sheets in front of them to try and work around every known objection to their newsletter.

Now, I don’t have a problem as such with their product – we actually used to subscribe to it many years ago, but like everything else, it was just one more thing to suck up our limited attention and time during the day, and we just did not see the justification in carrying on with it.  Our accountant does a really good job to ensure that we maximise our tax breaks, and being accounting software developers, we actually have all the latest feeds on rules and regulations directly from the Australian Tax Office (ATO) anyway.

But try telling that to these guys.  I know they have been rude to other staff members in my company over the years.  So, my message to the Australian Tax Reporter – Please leave us alone now.  We will not buy your product, and we suggest that you tone down your sales techniques somewhat to not be so confrontational and pushy.

Image by CCBImages via Flickr

Being a former commercial pilot now turned PC enthusiast, I enjoy ‘virtual flying’ on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator from time to time.  Over the weekend, I was reading a magazine which gave a favourable review to an ‘add on’ aircraft for Flight Simulator.  It was from a UK company, and it looked really nice so I thought that I would purchase this particular add on, which was around AU$45.

I noticed that this company had a website, and that their add on was available for purchase on their online store and immediately downloadable for instant ‘play’.  Sounds great, so off I went to their website yesterday morning.  Their home page actually had a large, eye catching banner promoting this new aircraft amongst all their offerings, with a ‘click here’ button for more details.  Wonderful, I thought.  This shouldn’t take me long at all!

Uh Oh, clicking the banner only took me to their main online catalogue with a bunch of unrelated stuff listed in front of me.

Mistake #1: If you are promoting a special in an ad or on your home page, at least link to that item’s detail page when users click the banner or ad.

I had to dig down the navigation menus on the left to see the product I wanted on a third level menu category.  Interesting, when you consider that this vendor only had about 10 products to sell in total.

Mistake #2: Just because your online catalogue system allows you to have hierarchical product categorisation, it doesn’t mean you should always use it, especially if you only have a handful of products to begin with.

Now we were getting somewhere.  I found the product I wanted, and added it to my shopping cart, then clicked the ‘checkout’ button.  Very straightforward here and nothing out of the expected.

Next, I am asked to create an account on their web store to carry out the purchase.  Why?  This is probably the only thing I will ever buy from these people.  I already have about a thousand accounts strewn over web sites all over cyberspace that I will probably never ever use again.  Why do I need to create another?

Mistake #3: Don’t force your customers to have to create accounts on your site.  Allow casual buyers to breeze through the purchasing process as quickly as possible.

Oh well, at least the form asking for details in order to create the account is not too long.  As I am filling the information, and thinking of yet another password, I notice a lot of ads down the right hand side with some of their other products that they are trying to entice me to buy.  Not a problem – I have nothing against upselling.

When I get to the bottom of the form, I notice a drop down asking me for my currency of choice.  Seeing as all the pricing on the site was in UK Pounds Sterling, and given the recent currency fluctuations, I thought it would be nice to confirm my pricing in Australian Dollars.  So I change the drop down.  Immediately, the entire page resets to show me the ‘upsell’ items in Aussie Dollars.  Aaaargh!  The rest of the form that I painstakingly filled in has been reset!

Mistake #4: If you are going to have a form field that resets the page, either have it at the very top of the form, before the user has to enter anything, or else use some other AJAX style technology that can refresh parts of the page without ‘undoing’ all the customers other hard work.

Take 2 on the form – at least everything looks OK now, and I can see my purchase in AUD which is nice.  I go to process the payment, and I am confronted with a stark MySQL database error message saying that there was an error on their payment processing gateway.

Mistake #5: If you are going to use a third party payment gateway, which 99% of online stores use – at least make sure the service is reliable.

Fortunately, when I went back and then reclicked the ‘Process Payment’ button again, it brought up the payment gateway window asking me to approve the purchase.  However, when I clicked the ‘Approve’ button, I was immediately confronted with an error telling me that the currency I chose is not supported. Huh?

Mistake #6: For a seamless experience, make sure that the settings on your online shop are carried through to your payment gateway provider – in this case, making sure that they could accept the same currencies that you offered in your store.

So I go back and change the currency back to GBP, which of course then resets my entire form, forcing me to re-enter my details a third time.  Things are beginning to get tedious, but I really want that plane!  This time I can get through and approve the purchase.  It is at this stage I notice that the credit card type that I normally reserve for online purchases is not accepted.

Mistake #7: Make sure that the credit card types your accept are shown clearly on your site – preferably even before the customer starts the buying process.

No biggie, I simply used another card type that I have and the payment gets accepted.  I am immediately redirected to the download page on the vendor’s website.  Things are starting to look up.  I also immediately get an email from the payment gateway site with my serial number for the product.  Hooray.

One download later, I install the package using my serial number.  Almost trembling in anticipation, I fire up Flight Simulator, and Zounds! – my aircraft is there and waiting to be selected, so I (figuratively) jump in, strap on and fire up the engines and blast into the sky.  But wait – what is this timer on the top of the screen counting down from 300 seconds?  I find out 5 minutes later when the counter hits 0.  It turns out that this add on pack has an anti piracy function built it.  Apparently (when I read the README file afterwards – I mean, WHO reads the README file when you are installing?  I don’t) I have to activate the product first using their activation utility.

Ok, I have no problem against protection of intellectual property and preventing software theft, so I launch their activation utility, which shows me my serial number I entered earlier, plus a secret hash code, and a space for me to enter in my new activation code, which apparently I will need to phone or email the vendor to get.  Say again?

I look around the activation screen for a ’send email’ or ‘auto activation’ button, but cannot see one.  There is a ‘help’ button and when I click this, I am advised that I should retype in the numbers into an email or take a screenshot of the activation screen and email to the vendor.  What?? Hello!  This is 2008.  Surely you can send an email or activation request from the activation utility screen?? I mean, even Microsoft has been doing this for years.

No time.  I hastily capture the screen and attach to an email and send off to the vendor.  I figure that this is going to be a manual process on their part.  It was only 10am Australian Central Standard time, which made it around 1am in the UK, so I was expecting to wait at least 7 hours for a response.

Mistake #8: If you are going to have an activation process on your software, make it as painless and as automatic as possible to avoid inconveniencing your customer, especially AFTER they have paid good money and bought your package.

Mistake #9: Don’t force everyone to work the same time zone as you.  If you are going to have customers that are in a zone 12 hours different from you, set up interim procedures to ensure that they feel they are getting instantaneous service.  A simple autoresponder would even go a long way to helping.

Sure enough, at about 8pm at night my time, about 10 hours later, I get a nice email from the vendor with my activation code.  There is also a handy tip at the bottom of the email requesting that users of Windows Vista (which incidentally I was installing on) should visit an article on their support forums for some installation tips.  Good pre-emptive strategy.

Only, when I click on the link for the article, I get a message saying that the article does not exist.  What?  Further investigation on my part reveals that I have to register as a member on their support forums to see any article at all. What?  I am expected to create yet another user account on the net just to get support??  To cap it off, the user account I created on their online store does not work on the support forums.

Mistake #10: Don’t force your users to log in just to get support.  This information should be ‘out there’ for everyone to see regardless of whether they are a customer of yours already or not.  If you must make them register, at least do it for posting new topics.  Don’t lock them out of reading existing articles. Sheesh!

Mistake #11: If you have to make people create an account to use your site, at least make it transparent across all areas of your site to avoid two or more usernames to get to different areas of your site.  Abolish the account creation process for casual users who will only deal with you once.

So, finally, following the advice of the article, I manage to get my add on aircraft working properly on Flight Simulator X.  I am certainly having fun with it, but looking back, this should have been a painless 10 minute experience, but instead had turned into a gruelling, painful 10 hour saga.

If you run an online shop, or are thinking of starting one up, please heed these mistakes.  In my case, a great product and a great vendor was hampered by a less than ordinary experience – don’t let this happen to your customers.

Note: I dont claim to be perfect myself.  Thinking about it, I make about half of the mistakes above on my own site and software products.  Just goes to show that there is always room to reflect and improve!

Most of my clients and readers will be aware that we are a small development shop.  And I mean small.  There is basically only myself as the lead developer/analyst, plus I have two other programmers on contract who help me out from time to time on various projects.

Being a fairly disciplined and organised sort of programmer, I have always used some sort of software version control and bug tracking tools to ensure that our development cycle works at it’s best.  And being an Aussie company, I also love supporting local businesses, especially one that has a high profile and excellent customer reviews as Atlassian.

So this month, after out internal open source development platform (CollabNet Enterprise Edition) crashed for the nth time and we lost some data, I decided to look for a commercial equivalent.  Note: I believe that Open.Collab.Net is no longer distributing CEE these days – correct me if I am wrong.  Note2: I actually loved CEE, but it was always too unstable for my liking.

So I decided to check out JIRA, from Atlassian.  Whilst browsing their site, I noticed that they had a JIRA Studio product, which was a totally hosted product that included their excellent JIRA bug tracking, plus a wiki, plus Subversion hosting.  Excellent – just what I needed.

I had a look at their pricing, and it said US$50 per user.  Fantastic – certainly within our budget.  But wait…the fine print said 5 users minimum.  Minimum??  We only have at the most, 2 developers working on any one project.  What am I going to do with the other 3 licences?  US$250 per month is well outside of our budget.  At todays rate, that works out to around AUD$4900 per year.

Hmm, the average project we work on is around AUD$2000.  That means that we will need to bill at least 3 projects every year before I can even start putting food on the table.  Not Good.

Then I browsed the rest of their site.  Guess what?  I noticed that they give free licences for their JIRA bug tracker and Confluence wiki for personal developers.  Great, they must do the same for JIRA Studio too?  Wrong!  I couldn’t see anything.

Note: Yes, yes, I know – the personal licence is for non commercial use only, which excludes us.  But hey, I decided to check on this and to email their sales team to verify.  After all, I am a software developer as well, and I can understand these sort of licencing requirements.

So I shoot off an email to the JIRA sales team:

Good Morning,

I am very interested in the Jira Studio product, however being a small
2 person development shop, the pricing of US$2500 per year is outside of our
budget.  I was wondering if you had a personal/individual licence option
as with your non-hosted Jira product which may be affordable by smaller
companies such as ours?

Thanks,
Devan

A day later, I receive this very nice reply from Douglas:

Hi Devan,

Thanks for the email

Sorry to hear that JIRA Studio is outside your price range.

You might want to consider using one of our free JIRA Personal Licences.
These licences enable you to use any JIRA edition for up to 3 registered
users.

I hope this is helpful - please let me know if there's anything else I can
do to help out.

Cheers,
Douglas

OK, it was worth a shot.  Douglas’ suggestion however caused some ethical issues with me, so I decided to clarify:

Hi Douglas,

Thanks for your email - the only thing concerning me about the personal
licence, is that it states it is for 'non commercial, personal use only'.

Seeing as I actually do 'bespoke' software development for commercial
customers, I did not want to be in breach of the licence terms.

Is it still OK to use the personal licence in this instance?

Thanks,
Devan

Ok, I realise I am clutching at straws here…A day later, I get a reply from Nicholas:

Hi Devan,

Thanks for the update and the additional information.

As per my voicemail you should not use a JIRA Personal license in a
commercial environment such as your bespoke software development.
I recommend you look at purchasing a JIRA Standard license for Blaze.

Thanks Devan.  If you have any queries feel free to get in contact via
return email or 02 xxxx.

Regards,
Nicholas M
---
Please note I am located in our Australian office

Hmmm…Ok, another nice reply, but has anybody realised that I really wanted JIRA Studio?  Also, I had to giggle a bit at the signature tagline on Nick’s email – at least I wasn’t talking to anyone in Atlassian’s Guatamalen office!  But not being one to give up, I thought I would give it one last go:

Thanks for your reply Nicholas - but this leads me back to my original problem,
in that we are a small 2 person development house, and we like the features of
JIRA Studio.  Ideally we would like to use this solution, but the pricing is too
high for our needs.  We really only need 1 developer and 1 collaborator licences,
but having to purchase 5 minimum is a deal killer for us  

I can justify a spend of even $100 per month for such a service, given our size,
but $250 is prohibitive.

Cheers,
Devan

Pulled out the violins…weeping angels and all the stops.  Alas:

Hi Devan,

I'm sorry to hear the pricing for JIRA Studio is prohibitive for your team.

If you have any other queries feel free to get in contact via return email or
by calling 02 xxxx.

Regards,
Nicholas M

That’s it.  A 2 line ‘go to hell’ response.  Oh OK, perhaps not a ‘go to hell’, but a fairly final notice nonetheless.  I must admit at feeling a little bit deflated at this stage.  I thought that a company with a reputation for good customer service, and an easy going corporate nature might at least have turned around and said something like ‘we’ll check with the boss and see what we can do’…but perhaps not.

It looks like other people out there have had their fair share of similar experiences with trying to purchase from Atlassian.  Rob Di Marco from Innovation On The Run has written an article, as well as Zoli Erdos from Cloud Ave.

Ah well, looks like it’s back to evaluating Project Locker and Code Space, who seem to offer the same sort of services, but at prices friendlier to our business.  If anyone out there has any other recommendation, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment.