Sophie - ...I hate it when companies do this.
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Sophie
 
Date: 2011-07-06 02:40
Security: Public
xposthttp://soph.livejournal.com/221835.html
Tags:link, rants
Subject: ...I hate it when companies do this.

So, remember the messiah:studio offer I talked about in February? The idea was that the prices would slowly return to their regular prices after a while.

And yes, they have risen, but I'm fairly sure they've been stuck now at $199 and $149 for a while. And in fact, I just used Google Cache to verify that on July 1st, the page was reading that the price of the Pro edition would go to $249 on July 3rd, and $299 on July 24th. Today, that same page reads that it'll go to $249 on July 24th, and $299 on August 14th.

Not cool. Luring customers to buy with the promise that the price will go up later, and then not having the prices go up on schedule, is misleading and false advertising. And this isn't an out-of-date page that was only used during the offer; this is the page that's being linked to as the official Shop page.

This isn't a judgement on the actual software at all; merely a judgement on the practices of the company behind it. I really hate when companies pull sneaky things like that. :(

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foxfirefey: thoughtful
User: [personal profile] foxfirefey
Date: 2011-07-06 15:25 (UTC)
Userpic:thoughtful
Subject: (no subject)

This, uh, doesn't feel all that nefarious. The page you verified with cache also says that "(Limited Time Special. Price and days may change without notice)".

And the price did rise, from that viral promotional offer, around 500% and 1490%. Those are not trivial price raises from what you decided to promote. You don't have to feel like a mislead shill.

And I mean, it's just giving people more time to get it at a lower price, it's not even jerking people around (as far as I know) by lowering the price even more at points so they could have gotten it for less if they just waited.

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Sophie
User: [personal profile] sophie
Date: 2011-07-25 06:55 (UTC)
Subject: (no subject)

I've waited until now to reply because I was fairly sure that the prices would remain the same after the next deadline. I was right - if you check http://projectmessiah.com/x6/shop.html now, you'll see that now the dates have changed again and yet the prices remain exactly the same.

Bear in mind that I didn't post this on a whim; I posted this because I was pretty darn sure that the prices had remained at exactly the same points for months, but I had no real evidence of this. The cached page gave the evidence I needed to post, and now with this next deadline passed, there's more evidence.

I realise that the price did rise. I have no qualms about that. What I have a problem with is that they are saying that they will raise the price even further, and that just hasn't been happening. It has all the hallmarks of the typical sales tactic which involves lying and saying that the price will rise if you don't hurry up, and then never actually raising the price.

I'm not sure in this case whether it's flat-out lying or whether it's due to a programming failure, since the dates given are always two weeks apart. It could be either. But one would think that if they weren't getting the expected price for the software, that they'd notice that since it'd show up in their accounting; that alone makes me think it's probably just lying. They're not just changing the days without notice - they've changed the price permanently but don't want people to know about it. That's what it looks like, in any case...

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