Comment by ironkeith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ironkeith | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought Parallels, and it wasn't much better. From the email I sent them (after I finally found an email address):

- When I arrived on the checkout page (from the link in the nice email you sent), you had tacked on a $8 digital backup fee. That is a complete bullshit charge, and you added it by default with no explanation as to what it was, or why I would want it. It was also not particularly obvious whether or not I could remove said add-on. It is a shameless, low class, money grab.

- I switched my pricing from USD to CAD, and you added $10 despite the two currencies trading at parity (I quickly swapped back, and just paid in USD). Another shameless, senseless money grab.

- You require my name, home address, email address, and phone number in order for me to purchase downloadable software via Paypal. You do not need any of that information. You want it so that some tool in marketing can have pretty powerpoints. It should be optional. (Making it required simply requires me to make up information; a waste of both our time.)

- The “send me email spam” checkbox was checked by default. The only reason for this is to get permission to spam people too lazy to pay attention to the checkout. It’s another tasteless scam formulated by a greedy, customer hostile executive tool.

- After purchasing, I entered my serial number, and was informed that I would have to register to receive updates to the software I just purchased. I cannot explain to you how incredibly asinine I find that policy.

- The registration process once again required information I didn’t want to give you (requiring me to give you fake information)

- After registering, and confirming my registration via email, and entering my email/password combo into the application I was told that I had given invalid credentials, and to try again. (I hadn’t. I’m pretty good with copy/paste.) So I guess NO UPDATES FOR ME?

You require my name, home address, email address, and phone number in order for me to purchase downloadable software via Paypal. You do not need any of that information. You want it so that some tool in marketing can have pretty powerpoints. It should be optional

This is actually less for marketing purposes and more for running anti-fraud analysis, which is a key consideration when you sell software at their scales. When I write my (totally legitimate) Japanese address and phone number combined with my American credit cards, it often ends up in an order getting held for purgatory for 48 ~ 72 hours until I can point them to the resolutions for the last four orders I did through them and the fact that none were chargebacks for being stolen credit cards.

Steam also does something similar. You can thank your local pirate.

The digital backup fee is scamtastic, and (shockingly) isn't the worst thing they have pulled over the last few years (that would be automatically adding rebill fraud 'coupon booklet' subscriptions to the orders). They split the fee $7 to DR and $1 to the software publisher, which means that for sales of $50 software they make substantially more from that addon than for the software itself at almost all of their (myriad) pricing schemes for the core DR payment processing experience.

I think "via PayPal" is the key distinction that makes the fraud excuse less valid.

How so? It's as trivial as creating a new email account to create a new Paypal account, and even if they require credit card only Paypal accounts that can be easily fraudulent too. Fraud via paypal is just as rife as fraud without.

The only point at which an address can be used to prevent fraud, is between the credit card charging process and your bank. If it's paypal charging your credit card, they're the only ones who need your address.

That isn't true -- you can run a variety of heuristics to catch N% of fraud (and X% of legitimate payments) prior to submitting them to the bank, getting them accepted, and then having your merchant account ganked for high chargeback rates.

For example, an annoying system which will decrease chargebacks is "If your IP address goes to a country other than your billing address, shoot first and ask questions later." It bites me all the time, but there are sensible business reasons for it.

I tried to purchase Parallels a while back and gave up because:

* Even though you _can_ opt out of it (click the grey cross on the right of the product list), the "backup" fee is almost an extorsion scheme. When you buy Parallels, you buy the right to download it once. After that, it's up to you to properly manage your backups. If your hard disk crash and you didn't, you must buy a new version (unless you bougth the "extended download service").

* I'm in Europe, and they silently switched the price from $80 to 80€. This is almost $110. You can't switch back to USD, only to GBP (£65 which is as expensive)[1].

That's enough. I didn't wan't to know what other dark patterns they'd pull out further down the road.

[1] Actually, I've checked while writing this post, and it is possible to get the US shop in Europe too, but I couldn't find the way to do it a few months ago when I contemplated purchasing their program.

Let's also not forget Parallels repeatedly spams the crap out of you to buy Kaspersky and other miscellanea after purchase. Extremely irritating.

I went through the same process in 2006 for version 2, and bought the upgrade to version 3 when that came out. Turns out I always had to install the old version, activate it, install the new version, activate that. Did I buy version 4 when it came out? Of course not; I switched to VirtualBox.

Who's in charge for these dark patterns on their site?

wait ... so why did you buy it then?

so you think if you buy you can't have complaints? interesting world you must live in.

He could have gotten Virtualbox.

With the uncertain future that comes from being managed by Oracle now.

Not totally uncertain, there's the GPL'd version which contains almost all the functionality non-commercial desktop users would require (except USB 2.0 device speeds). Oracle can derail VirtualBox the trademark, but they can't prevent a fork.

To be fair, so far virtual box has moved ahead pretty well under oracle.

I would not support a business of which I had these sentiments:

It is a shameless, low class, money grab. (twice)

It’s another tasteless scam formulated by a greedy, customer hostile executive tool.

Surely there are competitors in the marketplace?

We vote with our dollars.

The competitor is VMWare, which it seems is just as bad.

I genuinely like the software, and they emailed me a $10 off promo the day before my trial expired. The entire process leading up to the purchase was top notch.

Oh, and I didn't know there was a free, quality alternative until shortly after. A painfully bad checkout is the price I pay for being too lazy to do any research. ;)

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