E-Junkie vs. Payloadz
I recently discovered e-junkie.com, another site designed to handle the back end of something like my digital download store. I had been using Payloadz for this until now, but the pricing at e-junkie seems like it’s going to work a lot better for me - it’s based on the number of products in the store rather than the actual dollar amount sold per month as Payloadz does it. I also think the shopping cart/download process is a little more slick.
There are a couple of things Payloadz seems to do better - Payloadz automatically switches between a regular Paypal account and a micropayments Paypal account depending on the purchase amount. Though when I asked the support people at e-junkie about this they said it was a feature they wanted to add, and would it be alright if they just made my account work that way as a test? So for me that problem’s kind of solved - I don’t know when they’ll roll it out to all users. Also, currently e-junkie sends one email for each mp3 purchased, which is a little spammy if you buy ten songs at once. And they don’t handle spaces in filenames very well, so I had to do some renaming here and there. But if you want to know the truth, I’m not exactly thrilled with the level of customer support I’ve been getting at Payloadz anyway. Between that and the better pricing, I’ve decided to try switching over to e-junkie to see how it goes.
The mp3 part of the store is now live on e-junkie, I’ll be watching closely in case there are any problems (and transferring the karaoke files over to the new store too). After that, FLAC.
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:54 am
It looks really slick the way the shopping cart appears. I hope your relationship with e-junkie works out.
August 22nd, 2007 at 12:18 pm
FLAC? You’re going to release your songs in a free lossless (audio) codec? That sure would be nice since we can get them at a higher quality.
August 22nd, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Yes, FLAC! This is so going to soft rock.
August 22nd, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Any chance of including image files of album covers and liner notes for people buying FLAC files? That would be sweet.
August 22nd, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Or just make covers and liner notes available for separate purchase?
August 24th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
If only you could get them to rename it E-Monkey it would be perfect for you
Have a great weekend,
JY
August 30th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
FLAC! FLAC! FLAC!
September 6th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Any chance of including image files of album covers and liner notes for people buying FLAC files? That would be sweet.
September 8th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
[But if you want to know the truth, I’m not exactly thrilled with the level of customer support I’ve been getting at Payloadz anyway.]
That’s putting it gently. The “customer support” at Payloadz is aggressively inept, incompetent and offensive.
They’d rather spend days arguing with customers via e-mail rather than minutes fixing the errors in their forms.
Yes on Payloadz for their micropayments support, No for their horrible customer service.
December 13th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Thanks for letting us know about this. I had a horrible experience with payloadz, and when I told them how I felt they canceled my account. Terrible company to work with.
ejunckie is also way cheaper
January 4th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Wow, I’m so glad I read this article, and the comments left! I also had a couple of completely miserable support experiences with PayLoadz—like, the answers I received couldn’t have been shorter or ruder.
I also had kind of a weird experience with customers telling me that when the put digital goods in their carts, they got phishing warnings on the PayLoadz address. When I inquired about this, I got the stock “the problem is with your customers, not with us” answer—and when I persisted, I too had my account terminated.
I’m off to check out e-junkie. Thanks for the heads up!
January 20th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Ehm, i’m fine with payloadz. But e-junkie. Seems pretty different to me. I will try and looks first. Who know its working with me.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:33 am
You’re super lucky that they’re using you as a test account now. That was certainly one of those things where you’re just in the right place at the right time, it seems. But still, for me in South Africa, this service is still not workable. Why? Because Paypal doesn’t want to work this side – so it’s turned out to be a bit of a nuisance when it comes to buying things over the net… and selling things. I hope that they sort out this issue soon, because it really has become a problem.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Thanks for this article. I recently started selling guitar lesson videos, and Payloadz worked fine until I started selling HD lessons and the file sizes got big, and I accumulated a lot of files on the server.
People started having download problems and support is not great with Payloadz in my experience. I just discovered eJunkie and will definitely be checking it out.
March 30th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Well, it looks like the choice is between two bad options. I’ve been with e-junkie for a few weeks. I love their admin design and the slick flash-based shopping cart. I thought e-junkie was going to rock.
Then I reached my storage limit. On their site they say to contact them to upgrade at $20/month per gig. No sweat. Except - I requested this 5 days ago and have not heard a word. Now their support forums reflect this issue across everyone - they haven’t responded to support in many days.
My hope is that e-junkie has gone into hibernation to fix their system. Who knows.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Payloadz has (apparently recently) doubled their prices. Rather than costing somewhere between 2.5% and 5% of your revenue, they now want between 5% and 10% of your revenue.
Think I better check out e-junkie…
April 14th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
AVOID PAYLOADZ LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!!!
15% Commision costs for starters then they shut my site down (over 100 products listed) for no reason other than this one line email recieved of them…
“your account has been suspended for violating our terms”…
remember i only received this email after asking them what has gone on…
No explanations, terribly rude staff…AVOID
(i never found out why exactly they closed my account)
May 8th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Just like you we’re also searching for something that will really work for our online store. Although we haven’t had any problems with Payloadz, I guess price really matters. Thus we must find something that will work better but with lower price.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I’ve been selling MP3 tracks with E-Junkie for nearly 2 years now, so I think I have a little perspective on their progression through the inevitable “growing pains” that happen to all companies that don’t stagnate.
My take (from talking to their developer) on their recent customer service problems is that they grew too fast, too quickly. But, they are working aggressively to fix things to get back to the same level of amazing customer service that I have always known them to have. They’ve hired new staff and are moving to a much more robust storage infrastructure. Based on the rapid responses (less than several hours) I’ve received from a few support tickets I’ve submitted in the last week, my guess is that they have solved their problems - or are well on their way, at least.
I’ve had nothing but good experiences selling with E-Junkie, and would be happy to talk with anyone about their services. In fact, I’m so pleased with what they offer that I built a consulting and training business that specializes in helping “non-techie” people learn how to implement E-Junkie successfully and easily.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Lee, the payment plan option seems very automated to me. Why do you need to email them for it?
May 20th, 2008 at 9:12 am
FunnyEmployeeAwards.com has used e-junkie for six months to sell both a digital download (eBook) and tangible goods (trophies). We’ve stayed with them because of ease of use, excellence in delivering downloadable products, and low price. There are some cons, though, especially around the area of thank you emails. Read my full e-junkie shopping cart software review