One Bad Apple experience…

I’ve been doing a win-loss survey for a client of mine, and we’re offering the lost accounts an incentive to participate - a $25 iTunes card. Because it’s more convenient all-round, I agreed to purchase and expense the cards, and then decided it was more convenient all-round if I purchased virtual gift cards online.

So far, so good.

Last night, I went to send the cards out to the first batch of interviewees.

It was a slight pain-in-the-butt to find out that I couldn’t order online unless I had iTunes loaded on my laptop.

Which was fine, since I do have an iPod - I just hadn’t bothered to download iTunes and copy my back-ed up library of toons onto my no-longer-so-new machine (now almost 7 months old).

That was easy enough.

But just try to find the place where you can actually order the virtual gift cards.

You have to find your way to Redeem a Gift Card, at which place you’ll see a little-bitty option off to the side that you can click on if you want to give the gift of an online card.

Well, once the support folks at Apple - very pleasant, by the way - let me know that this was the magic location, I was good to go.

Until I found out that $25 wasn’t an option for an online gift card. $20 - yes; $30 - yes. But no $25.

But, hey, what’s another $5, consider this is a lot easier and speedier than typing up notes to accompany real, in your hand gift cards.

I ordered my first four online gift cards, then got a message when I tried to order the fifth that I had exceeded the number of gift cards allowed, and that I wouldn’t be able to order any more for 24 hours.

Now, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what can possibly be the motivation behind this. What possible difference could it make to them? It’s not as if, with a $120 purchase, I exceeded my Visa credit limit. Is there that much online fraud with virtual card theft? While I was using a personal e-mail account to order - should have used the e-mail address my client gave me, but this was my personal iTunes account we’re talking about here - all of the cards were being sent to corporate addresses - no gmails, no hotmails, no aol’s - so they should have at least looked legit. And if I were going to defraud, wouldn’t I have gone for a number larger than (and other than $30).

After I got closed out of ordering my fifth card, I saw a little note pop up that said if I wanted to keep ordering, I needed to contact Customer Support.

This in itself was fairly painful - and somewhat ludicrous: when you contact Customer Support online, it first indicates that they’ll get back to you in 24 hours and then, once you send your question in, you find that they’ll get back to you in 48 hours.

As it turns out, I did hear back from Apple in a bit less than 24 hours, with a very pleasant and courteous e-mail from a support rep, telling me that:

To protect your account from what may have been fraudulent transactions, the iTunes Store automatically blocks your account when you exceeded the maximum number of iTunes Gift Certificates that may be purchased within a 24-hour period

And suggesting that I go through their corporate marketing department for large volume purchases. My purchase, however, is a relatively modest volume, which just happens to be larger than the allowed four. (And where did this number come from? It seems preposterously low.)

Hey, iTunes is still one of the most intuitive, easy to use applications I’ve ever used. The people I’ve spoken to on the phone, and who’ve communicated with me via e-mail, have been unfailingly helpful and pleasant. But let me tell you, ordering virtual gift cards online was no bright and shiny apple, that’s for sure.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.

The Opinionated Marketers | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice