Michael Carvin's dashboard

I have this problem too. Chris@uofdreams.com

The ability not to create account or just guest account may at first seem a great "straight to the point" purchase, but RM is such as highly niche publisher just like Pragmatic Programmer where they produce great book that are just "different". Unlike Apress, *Oreally*, etc.. so my suggestion is to force them to create account.. and u have PDF too... that is even more so to maintain one where we can occasionally re-down it like Peepcode etc..

I promise to not participate in such an insurrection. Scout's honor :) – mcarvin, on May 12, 2008 18:17

Hi folks, I think there are two possible problems here:
1) The extra masked characters that show up when you enter a password. Apparently this is a very old security measure, and in any case, it's causing too great a hassle for our customers, so we're working on disabling it.
2) The bigger issue is that our cart is fooling customers into thinking they've created accounts when they actually haven't. Essentially, customers provide all the information that would be required for a permanent account, but haven't opted to create the account. They think they have, but every time we check to see if they're in our customer database, they haven't.

I could really use input on this latter issue; it's the #1 customer service request we've had by far. I've always assumed that customers would greatly prefer to have the option of creating a guest account. But each transaction includes a downloadable digital edition, and it's really hard to make the file accessible to customers without permanent accounts, especially when session cookies have expired or when customers want to download the file to another computer.

So... Will requiring our customers to create permanent accounts cause an insurrection? :-) I'd really appreciate hearing your thoughts on this issue.

Hi, Lou! I'm having the same problem as Michael. Email address is jerry@paradowski.com. Looking forward to reading this one!

Michael, so sorry; I'm going to email you the file right now.

Our original shopping cart design misled a lot of our customers into thinking that they had created an account when in fact they haven't. We've changed the design in the past month and it seems to made a big difference, but it's definitely possible that there are still some problems. Do you happen to know for sure if you did create an account?

Thanks for bringing it up, and again, apologies for the hassle!