Yesterday I mentioned that my customers suddenly had a lot of trouble getting mails from e-junkie. Besides posting it on my blog, I also dropped e-junkie a note to advise them of the problem — it seemed like the right thing to do since if their outgoing mail server ended up on a RBL that would have been, well, a pretty bad thing for their business. They had a response within 2 hours that said they had gotten my note, checked everything, and it looked to be in order. But they kept following up regarding the specifics of which ISPs were misbehaving and whatnot, which is already above and beyond the call of duty.
I then asked whether I could possibly request a feature. Yesterday, I faced down the unpleasant prospect of having to *gulp* code Perl to fix this problem, by embedding my registration code in the post-sale confirmation page. e-junkie currently passes that page ~4 parameters when they send a customer to it, but none of them is the registration code, and I would have to generate the registration code on my server to make sure the code on that page and in the email were the same. Then I would use the parameters they passed to look up the registration code I had generated. Aside from this involving evil Perl code (is there any other kind?), there were some potentially nasty timing issues involved (pop quiz: what happens if the customer arrives before I have the request from e-junkie to generate the registration code? What happens if the customer arrives after the request to generate the registration code but before that request has caused the flat-file database I was contemplating to be updated?)
So I asked e-junkie if it were not too much trouble could they possibly pass the registration code along with the other parameters. If they did that, fixing this problem would be a matter of writing ten lines of Javascript. (The URL query string is stored in window.location.search. Code for parsing out a particular value from it is trivial or you can copy/paste from the Internet. Then just output this to something visible.)
Anyhow, I figured that they would probably “We’ll take this feature request under advisement”. I definately wasn’t expecting the next email to say “We were going to mail you back when this was implemented, but it turns out our engineering team will require 24 hours to get to it. Sorry for the delay.”
Sorry for the delay!
So there you have it: e-junkie, the best $5 per month I ever spent. (Obligatory disclaimer: opinions in this post are my own and I receive no compensation for them.)
I use Element 5 (ShareIt) because they can call my Windows DLL to generate the registration code. This is very cool.
Plimus supports this for Linux DLLs or something, unfortunately they don’t support Windows DLLs, which SUCKS.
Brian, E-junkie supports windows DLL & executable KeyGens as well.
One more question: isn’t the name e-junkie turn the user off? I for one wouldn’t trust a junkie and wouldn’t give my ca$h to a company called e-junkie.
Don’t they have an alternative marketed more blandly, such as, I don’t know.. Secura E-Commerce Provider would be a good name because it suggests security?
One of the reason I’m using Element 5 is their corporate image. Ok, they don’t have a flashy site, but they are not a junkie or hooker either.
I wonder if this comment will get eaten by the great anti-spam guardian which is protecting this blog. :)
Yeah, both e-junkie and payloadz (accent on the z, naturally) have that perception problem. Luckily, unless you hover over my links you never actually see the e-junkie branding anywhere. The email is from @bingocardcreator.com, its text is 100% written by me, the first page you see pop up after clicking on Purchase Now says “Paypal” on it, and then after the purchase is completed you’re magically back to Bingo Card Creator territory. Unless you’re watching a status bar e-junkie plays no part in the transaction for you. :)
That was one of my original reasons for dropping payloadz, incidentally. They allowed me to include a message along with their email, but the email was still from @payloadz.com and some of the language did not exactly match my corporate image.
Patrick, have you tried .htaccess redirects to mask the purchase URL’s? I do that one several of my sites. Works well (use a 302 (or temporary) redirect, not a 301 (permanent)) for me.
Thats not a half bad idea, actually.
A CNAME record will do the trick as well.
Is there an alternative that can be used for a small number of large products? I sell audio loop libraries and my products range form about 150mb to 400mb, EJunkie and all the alternatives Ive seen seem to charge through the nose for storage space for some reason.
I need a service that doesn’t care how much storage I use and charges a reasonable monthly fee (read $20 -$40 per month) .
In that case, I’d recommend that you use e-junkie for the order processing and some sort of commodity web hosting for the actual downloading. I think my GoDaddy hosting account comes with 50 GB of disk space and more bandwidth than I could shake a stick at.