FastSpring Store Unexpectedly Offline
I think I will need to be leaving FastSpring as the sole shop for my apps and ebooks and stuff.
At the very least, I’ll need to set up an alternative as a fallback:
2 days ago I received an email that one of the shop backends was being ‘offline’d and no live transactions will go through.
No prior notice, no information as to why. Also, the reply email is automation@ so I needed to manually get in touch with support.
Still waiting for “risk team” reply after support “escalated” my inquiry.
Thankfully, this hasn’t happened to me, though I’ve recently had trouble logging into their admin interface. FastSpring’s communication used to be excellent, but as previously discussed they seem to have changed.
FastSpring support has gotten really terrible. They had some kind of bug where one of my colleagues couldn’t log in for THREE DAYS. Each exchange cycle with their “support” took 24 hours, with no escalation path. We have no “relationship manager” or other direct point of contact.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-17): Christian Tietze:
Wait, my FastSpring store has been deactivated again?
On top of the other deactivation?
What is going on here?
Tuesday I got the first email. Friday the second, same text.
It’s Saturday, I still haven’t heard from anyone.
Unfortunately, we see the same thing happening with Paddle. They used to be excellent but customer support is now a chatbot and dev support also takes a day per exchange cycle …
oh no, they started deploying the chatbot against vendors too something like a year ago. It seems to be on and off and if you complain, they turn it off, but it’s there. And the boilerplate replies usually take 2-3 tries to get past for me…
Update (2024-08-19): Christian Tietze:
Did I mention I haven’t heard anything helpful from FastSpring in 6 days now?
In the past I was pleasantly surprised when support would reply on Saturdays. Now that support is useless, I’m waiting for I-don’t-know when.
Update (2024-08-20): Logging into FastSpring stopped working again. I e-mailed them and got a quick reply, indicating that they needed to change the username on my account. Then it immediately started working again.
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I have had trouble logging in, too. But this was resolved quickly. I've gotten an email where they push 2FA.
My biggest problem with Fastspring is that they block email addresses for no reason at all. The whitelisting takes up to 10 days. Whereupon most customers don't stick around.
Yes, communication with Fastspring is suboptimal.
I had two separate stores with FS (until I moved to Paddle in January after they suddenly demanded for that unreasonably high, yearly, verification fee).
One of the two stores got disabled in May 2023, and I was told it was because it had no sales for 6 months. I had complained that they should have at least warned me, because it only came to light when a customer tried to make a purchase.
Steven Miller, Risk Manager, replied: "Your feedback has encouraged us to revisit our policy, especially, with regards notifying our sellers prior to deactivation, so thank you for that."
Paddle is rather slow as well, and their docs are a mess because they changed to a new API and they're difficult to keep apart, but when I made a few features requests, they all eventually came through, and they kept me in the loop. It was much more work to set up my payment with them, compared to FS, but I learned a bit on the way (PHP and JS, ugh!) and have now more control over the sales as well, which was long due :)
