I’ll be the first to tell you that one of the easiest ways you can frustrate customers is promising an “Instant Download” and then making them wait a long time to get that download.
I recently ran into the problem when I was helping a friend setup a website, we purchased a WordPress theme for the site and then the waiting period began.
They were using a merchant processor other than PayPal, and they quickly blamed the delay it on the provider in an automated response that I received.
They said that I had to call an “anti fraud” department to verify the order… OK.
So, I called the anti fraud department at this merchant processor, and they were quite confused. They said that they don’t ever require manual verification, and if they do in extreme circumstances, they call the customer, not the other way around.
Basically what was happening was the vendor was blaming their extremely slow turnaround time on the merchant account, and the merchant account quickly let me know that they were full of it.
Technically at this point, hours of waiting, certainly would no longer be an “Instant Download” anymore. At this point, I technically didn’t get what I paid for. They were using this false claim to get more sales, knowing full well that they can’t do “Instant Downloads” for whatever reason. I went with this particular vendor because they were one of the few that had what I wanted and offered the instant downloads, supposedly.
I won’t be naming names, my point was not to “out” any companies in particular that are making these false claims, but just to help all of you that are doing eCommerce or selling instant downloads to be very careful on your delivery claims.
Let me guess, the payment processor was Plimus. If so then I can almost guarantee that the vendor was telling the truth and it was Plimus who was messing about.