Buyer Beware: Plimus ecommerce SUCKS

Edit: Updated - Please see the bottom of the post.
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Wow, I'm really truly stunned that this is for real...and it's 2008 on the Internet and I actually have to deal with this sort of bullshit...

Anyway, last night I made an electronic purchase. The person was using 'Plimus' as their outsourced ecommerce provider. I had never heard of Plimus before (I've used Share*It and a few other 'familiar' ones in the past, but never Plimus...), and was a little worried, so I put the sale on pause and went on a search for a bit of info about Plimus.

Well, the search temporarily put my concerns at ease - looks like they were a large, professional, established US-based ecommerce company. And along with creditcard numbers, can process with PayPal accounts. "No problem" I thought.

So I went ahead and made my purchase. Filled out all the forms. Used my home address and contact info, used my PayPal account.

PayPal went through no problem. I go to check my email, and I see this:

___________
Dear XXXXXX

Thank you for your recent order for XXXXXXXX. In order to approve this order we must contact you via telephone. Due to the current time and as a token of respect to your household we do not wish to call you at this time without your permission.

Please visit the following link and provide us with the phone number and best time when we can reach you, so we can process your order:
http://www.plimus.com/ask_phone.jsp?ref=XXXXX

Your phone number is always kept strictly confidential and will never be used for sales calls, it will only be used to verify this order.

Regards,
Plimus Sales
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wtf???

Now this is concerning to me. Very much. Because of my job, I am very 'identity theft aware', and this was so out-of-the-blue, so unorthodox, all I could think is that they are trying to profile people for identity theft. There's no way in hell they need to verify my working telephone number (in addition to ALL the TONS of other info they needed to collect in order to allow me to order through them - actually through a PayPal passthrough payment, which makes it all even stranger).

I sat there, stunned for a while, absolutely ready to cancel my order and bitch the company out. I realized, the money was already gone from my PayPal account. I also realized I had never given any of my creditcard info to these shady Plimus people (THANK YOU PAYPAL!). And I really wanted the product (an anti-spam plugin for phpBB forums).

So I went to their stupid telephone form, and entered the number THAT I HAD ALREADY GIVEN THEM again, and seleted the "call anytime" box.

13 hours later they called. A grumpy sounding person asked if I had ordered the product. I said I did. He said "OK, You'll have email confirmation in a few minutes" and hung up.

A few minutes later - I had email confirmation, BUT - confirmation that the product developer had now been notified of my purchase, and would respond within 48 hours.

It's now been 24 hours since the purchase, 11 hours since the callback. No sign of the developer or the product I purchased.

I'm absolutely steaming. If this was a downloable game I had wanted to play on Friday night, I would have been twice as pissed (Plimus is used a lot by the indie game dev commuinity - see this related thread ).

I have absolutley NO IDEA what could have caused Plimus to think my sale was 'high risk' or whatever. I used my primary 'family' email address at a major ISP (not a Gmail account), I gave all my personal information - this is just outrageous that they need all this info PLUS verify a working phone just to take a passthrough payment from PayPal. Totally unacceptable to me. Like, TOTALLY, TOTALLY, WRITE UP A GOOGLE-SEARCHABLE BLOG ENTRY UNACCEPTABLE.

Anyway, I'm putting this out to you guys as a warning, because I know that like me you probably make a lot of online purchases. I will not purchase anything that uses Plimus as a checkout provider ever again. Not a chance in hell. I'll find something else or go without. This is absolutely unacceptable to me. A fucking PHONE CALL? 13 HOURS LATER? WTF? Sorry guys, you lose. That's totally, totally bullshit.

Fail.

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Update: Well, the developer got in touch with me, about 24 hours after the inital purchase was initiated. Actually considering the time/geography difference, and Plimus' 13 hour pre-call wait, it was a very fast response from the developer.

The developer was very apologetic about the whole thing, and I want to be clear I hold none of this against the devs or the companies that have chosen Plimus as a source of payment & customer frustration - they have my sympathy. Also the dev told me that the 48 hour thing was bullshit as well - there should have been an automatic email of the license to me AS SOON as Plimus had verified the order. This never happened, and the developer had the grace and forsight to email me a copy of the license from his personal Gmail account, just in case I hadn't received it 'automatically' (which obviously I didn't). What a disaster.

Anyway, nice thing about the small and indie devs is the level of care for the customer, too bad they get caught up in the crap policies of the big internet companies they often have to partner with.