One Bad Apple Experience Begets Another

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about my difficulties ordering iTunes online gift cards, which we’re giving out as thank-yous to the folks who participated in a Win-Loss Survey for a client of mine. (We thought that the “Losses” might be more willing to spend time with us if we offered them a little something in return. I can say that it worked - it was far easier than I anticipated to find people wiling to open up about their experience not-buying our product.)

My initial problem with ordering the gift cards was that there’s a strict limit on how many you could order at one time - apparently a safeguard against rotten-to-the-core identify thieves who steal credit cards, then charge up a bunch of gift cards which are (I guess) easier to spend/less traceable. (Although I would think that, since everything has some sort of serial number on it, gift cards can be shut down almost as easily as a stolen credit card. But what do I know about such things?) Maybe my mistake was using a personal, rather than corporate, e-mail address to do my purchasing. Maybe they would have let me buy more if I had a more legitimate sounding address.

Oh, well.

I finally did get to purchase all those online iTunes cards, only to hear back from someone in Canada that, sacre bleu, he couldn’t use the American bought gift card to make a purchase on the Canadian iTunes site.

Through Apple’s quite helpful customer service, I was able to cancel the iTunes card for my pal in Quebec.

I then trucked on over to the iTunes Canada site figuring that - just as I can go to another country and make a credit card purchase using an American card, I could go ahead and solve my problem by buying a gift card denominated in Canadian dollars.

Well, that didn’t work, either.

I know that Apple is all about ease of use, but I’ve got to say that this bite of the Apple has been decidedly sour.

Sure, their customer support was fine, but they sure make it difficult to buy their online cards.

Leading me to the conclusion that they really don’t want to sell them.

If this is the case, why not just get rid of them, rather than allowing customers like me to jump through progressively smaller, flaming hoops to make their purchases.

Just a suggestion, one marketer to another…

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