I normally don’t do this, but we haven’t heard from this user for a couple of days, and we have no other way of getting in touch with them.

One of our customers has incorrectly entered an email address that, according to their mail server, doesn’t exist.

So, Dustin, if you’re reading this, the mail address you entered when you ordered is incorrect. I’d love to send you your download details, so please contact us via this blog, the forums, or the Customer Service contact form and let us know a valid email address we can send your order details to.

While I’m on the topic of order emails, please note that our order system is automated, so you’ll receive an download instructions email from us as soon as your order is processed. If you don’t receive the email straight away, it’s either because it ended up in your junk email folder or because the email address used when ordering was incorrect.

If you don’t receive a download instructions email from us right away, please contact us and we’ll do everything we can to get your software to you as soon as possible.

We’ve changed the way customers download software they’ve bought to make the process faster and easier to use. The old download process had a number of steps:

• A customer entered their email address on our Support page.
• A new software download link was sent to their email address.
• The download link took the customer to a download page.
• The customer entered their email address into a form on the page then clicked the “Download” button.
• Their software started downloading.

Apart from requiring customers to jump through a few too many hoops, there were a couple of issues with this system. Firstly, a small number of customers with very agressive spam-filters couldn’t receive the download link email (or it ended up in their junk email folder, which for most people is the same as not receiving it). Some email applications also split the download link itself into multiple lines, which meant that users who clicked directly on the link got an error message instead of their software. Finally, customers sometimes changed email addresses, which meant they had to go through the extra step of asking us to change their details before they could get their software.

The new download process has been significantly streamlined:

• The customer enters their email address and order reference number into a form on the Help page then clicks the “Download” button.
• Their software starts downloading.

You may have also noticed a couple of changes to the Otaku Software website, particularly the Help/Support section. I’ll be talking about these modifications and the reasons behind them in a future blog post.

Our payment provider, Plimus, has added the ability to pay via PayPal. We changed to Plimus because of customer complaints about PayPal, but have since received requests from some users to add PayPal support back in, so this new feature will give everyone the best of both worlds.

A while ago I talked about introducing an affiliates programme for TopDesk. It didn’t end up happening then for a number of reasons, but as of the 1.4 release I’m of the opinion that TopDesk is mature enough to make affilate sales viable, so you can now sign up for the TopDesk affiliate program.

The plan is to start off with a small number of affiliates and see how it goes. If we don’t run into any problems then the programme will be expanded to accommodate more people.

One of our customers* is currently having a problem receiving emails from us, and since a few others have had the same problem in the past, I though I’d post about it so everyone’s aware of the issue.

The problem is that we’re getting orders from spam filtered email addresses so every time we try and send them something, it bounces. As far as the ordering process is concerned, this means that Plimus can’t send a user order confirmation or receipt emails, and, more importantly, we can’t send them a download link to the full version of TopDesk. Even worse, when the customer emails us to tell us that they didn’t receive anything, any replies we send back also bounce. I’d hate to think what their opinion of Otaku Software is at that point.

This is a huge problem as far as I’m concerned, as there’s probably nothing more annoying than buying something and then not being able to get your hands on it straight away. It’s extremely frustrating for a customer, as they may not realize the spam filter is the cause of the problem, and it’s very frustrating for us, as we have an unhappy customer that we can’t communicate with. In the past we’ve been lucky enough to eventually get through to the customers and sort everything out, but obviously I’d rather prevent the situation happening at all.

At the moment, there’s a notice (in bright red) at the top of the order page asking customers not to use a spam filtered email address, but it doesn’t seem to be working (I’ve skipped over the same kind of things on online order forms myself, so I can see how easy it’d be to miss it), so I’m open to suggestions about how to reduce the problem and make customers more aware of the issue. One idea I had was to encourage users concerned about spam to use a free email account address (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc..) when ordering, but that’s way too much work on the customers part for my liking, and Plimus, our payment gateway, isn’t a big fan of those types of accounts. Does anyone have any other ideas?

* While I don’t want to post any personal details about the customer I’d still like get a message out to them, so to Steve from Canada: can you please either add us to your no-spam list and let us know, or send us a non-spam filtered email address we can reach you at?