I’ve been selling downloadable stuff for a number of years now. The basic process hasn’t changed: you buy something using PayPal, PayPal sends me an email letting me know about the purchase, I see the email, I respond to the email with the link, username and password for the item. Not perhaps the most streamlined process; I have to see the email in order to respond to it, which means if I’m asleep, or in a bronchitis-induced coma, or out grocery shopping or some such I might very well not see the email *immediately.* But as soon as I see the email, I send the response and you get your stuff.
Sometimes things go wrong. Typically, when a PayPal purchase is made, I get the notification from PayPal within minutes. Sometimes, though, for reasons unclear the email does not come in for hours, and on rare occasion, not at all. I’ve no idea if it’s a problem on PayPals end or something screwy with email in general, but there it is. So if you order something and don’t get a reply within the span of a nights sleep, feel free to send me an email asking what’s up. What has happened on occasion is that everything on *my* end worked fine… but the purchasers anti-spam system saw my response-email as spam and dumped it.
Here’s how *not* to respond:
A message was received at 11:05 AM wanting to know where the product he purchased was. I was not online at the time. Seventeen minutes later, another email (“No download”) came in, demanding a refund. Within half an hour of that, I saw the emails and issued the refund instantly. Note that *three* *hours* later the email notification of the order finally came dragging in from PayPal, long after the order had been refunded.
You know, sometimes things don’t work perfectly. But even in worst-case, the order would have been processed within four hours of when it was made. Now, I understand a lot of you youngun’s have lived in a world of instant gratification… you order a song download or a movie online, you get it Right Now. So a few hours might seem like a horrible long time. But you know what? There was a time, not so very long ago, when if you saw an add for something you wanted, there was, right there in the small print, “Please allow four to six weeks for delivery.”
If I knew of a way to automate the process – especially a way that didn’t yoink a sizable percentage, since the “profit margin” *now* is so razor-thin as to be a bad joke – I’d be on it like white on rice, like ugly on an ape, like a hobo on a ham sammich. But in numerous years of mentioning this, nobody has yet suggested a workable alternative to the system in place.
So… don’t be this person.
