E-Junkie vs. Payloadz

By JoCo August 22, 2007

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.

Comments

seneschal says

It looks really slick the way the shopping cart appears. I hope your relationship with e-junkie works out.

Mike says

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.

witten says

Yes, FLAC! This is so going to soft rock.

Luke M says

Any chance of including image files of album covers and liner notes for people buying FLAC files? That would be sweet.

Luke M says

Or just make covers and liner notes available for separate purchase?

JY says

If only you could get them to rename it E-Monkey it would be perfect for you ;-)

Have a great weekend,

JY

Matthew says

FLAC! FLAC! FLAC!

Resim says

Any chance of including image files of album covers and liner notes for people buying FLAC files? That would be sweet.

Bob Dylan says

[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.

Gavin says

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

Mary says

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!

tita says

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.

jewellery says

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.

Anthony says

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.

Lee says

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.

PayloadzGrump says

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...

TLC says

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)

portrait paintings says

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.

Andrew says

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.

Sam says

Lee, the payment plan option seems very automated to me. Why do you need to email them for it?

Larry Weaver says

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

Mike says

I am about to go check e-junkie but does anyone have any experience using it with affiliate applications. Payloadz affiliate builder once you finally get them to expelain it (10 e-mails) basically points to the payloadz store not your own website which makes no sense. Plus the don't allow you to integrate 3rd party affiliate apps.

Mike

Sarah says

Thanks for the blog and the feedback/comments. Someone told me about PayLoadz and I was considering them until I saw the whopping 15% fee!! I was wondering if there was another company providing the same type service, so thanks to you all, I'll check out e-junkie.

My concern now is Larry Weaver's comment about the "thank you emails" because that is the main feature I need so I can tell customers how to access their product. My clients don't download anything, they need to access a certain link to train online. Sending it manually after receiving paypal proof of payment isn't working because I am unable to get back to them in a timely manner (travel a lot). Sometime they wait hours before I can get the access link emailed to them and I'll lose business that way.

Rosario says

Have you tried Kiqlo? Kiqlo is completely and entirely free. You can upload your stuff and get your buy now button. No limit on upload, no limit on number of file uploaded.
I hope this helps

Gen frrom Tokyo says

I was able to talk to the creator of E-Junkie in person before I signed up!!

Yes, his name is on the support/contact us page!

I have been struggling with payloadz. People purchase my product, and after they purchase they are not able to download the product. We ask payloadz why and they copy past answers from the FAQ page! I still have no idea why we can't download products even we paid for them. And to me they seem a bit over priced.

Gen frrom Tokyo says

I just wanted to add a few more things. I would recommend E-junkie to anyone who is offering audio book products. I do NOT recommend payloads. There are several reasons.

E-junkie is like an Ipod, its intuitive, easy to use, any 4 year old could figure it out. The style is awesome, and its fast. When I uploaded my 67mb audio book, it only took 3 min.

Payloadz is like using Texas Instrument Graphing Calculator. There's a lot to learn, and the userface is not the friendliest I've seen. (I'm sorry, I come from a place of abundance, its 2008 and if your customer service and user interface is not top rated you should not swim with the big fish.) And when I loaded my audio book, just the uploading took over an hour...

Let's get to the help section. I've messed around on the net long enough that no matter how user friendly the service seems, like aWebber or paypal, I always have technical questions. Payloadz have the worst customer service I have ever witness in my internet business career. I had an issue where clients paid for the product but they could not download because of X or Y reasons. So I asked customer support what specifically is the cause and what steps I could take so it never happens again. They sent back an answer which was copy pasted from their general FAQ page! I still haven`t figured out till this day. Which is too bad for them because our product sales are estimated to go $20,000 a month without including subscription and back end products. I don't think I need to tell you why I can't risk my business with a service provider like payloadz. I just cannot take that chance unless its my last option.

Now on to E-junkie. Since my experience in Payloadz I knew where I was going to encounter problems. My product is in Japanese and so are my clients. So I need to customize my thank you and download page so its in Japanese. I need to make sure that buynow button takes the cutomer to the Japanese paypal page. i checked out the help section and there was not enough data I could find. But I found the personal cell phone number of the creator on the site!! I skyped him, thinking I would leave a message but to my amazement he picked up the phone! He answered all of my techinical questions, and he even offered suggestions on how I can customize my thank you page, etc. And he told me that if I ever needed help again I can email customer service and they will look after me 100%.

Now that's customer service!

Oh, and the Payloadz pricing plan is RIDICULOUS!! Its outragous. I just don't get it. I really don't. I thought I got suckered.

So please, PLEASE DO NOT GO WITH PAYLOADS unless you checked out e-junkie, compared their support, technical functionality, and pricing.

If anyone is happy with payloadz or switched from e-junkie, I would love to hear about it. I still dont "get" payloads. shoot me an email at cnyc24@hotmail.com

Thanks,

Gen from Tokyo
you can check out my youtube videos under username "gettingaltitude"

Amber says

Just thought I'd also chime in on Payloadz, not that there isn't enough information here. Just as everyone else has said, their customer service is HORRIFIC. I've never been treated so poorly by a company that I was paying for services. They will not respond by phone, you can't contact anyone there except through email, and when I did contact their "support" they very effectively yelled at me through email. They would NOT answer my questions, they pretty much told me I was stupid and that I just needed to use their website, which is completely useless. I'm definitely going to look into E-Junkie. As everyone else has said, please don't bother going to Payloadz, all it will do is make you angry.

karina says

someone who can recommend an affordable shopping cart where shipping address is easy to edit?

Andre says

Same here. Payloadz has the worst customer service I have ever experienced. I had a disagreement with Payloadz about Payloadz' trademark I seem to have used it in one of my product's titles(Payloadz and Tradebit e-market script was the title).

Shannon(the owner of payloadz) deleted that item without warning.
I mailed him to ask why he did that and he replied with the trademark infringement reason. I asked him if I could just change the title...but no response for several days. I mail to him a few days later and ask him why he doesnt respond and that I am considering to cancel my account.
He replies with: "we already cancelled it" 30 minutes later after my last mail.

I tried to login and it worked. It seems that Shannon removed all of my articles out of the marketplace(about 1GB) and I couldnt create new ones...he probably did that with some admin option.

With nothing to sell anyway now, I cancel my monthly fee for payloadz in my Paypal account and look for the cancel subscription button in payloadz itself. That button was gone somehow...was it removed? I logout and try to login again, but nothing works...my account seems to be cancelled...deleted.

I mail Shannon and said to him that he has not heard the last from me(I was planning to write some negative feedback about his site here).
He replies to me: "You have not heard the last from our lawyers. I promise."

I have decided to ignore this person and his website from now on.

Conclusion about Payloadz:
- worst customer service ever
- aggresive and arrogant helpdesk(probably Shannon himself)..dont ever insult him...or else! your account will probably be deleted instantly.
- unprofessional
- short answers in his mail which make you feel even more helples
- lost $35 I spent in featured listings.
- lost 2 weeks of my monthly fee
- lost much of my time I spent writing descriptions and uploading my digital wares.
- AVOID Payloadz!

E-junkie and Tradebit are much better!

Danielle says

I have had a problem with Payloadz, and I am not really sure how to remedy it.

I had been a long standing customer for a few years without any trouble. On April 3rd, I started receiving errors when I attempted to upload files to their server. I contacted the help desk as directed, and I was sent patronizing emails telling me to just be patient. The following week, the coding problem was there again. I again contacted customer support, and I was given an email telling me something that wasn't applicable to what I had written about. This went on for a month not being able to upload product etc.

On May 1st, I attempted to upload product again and I received coding errors again. I couldn't load anything, and I had this error screen that was built in to the screen so it was something on their end. By this point I am getting mad because I am losing business, and becoming frustrated by the lack of concern and care. This same day, they debited my Paypal account for $29.00. Still no resolution to the problem, AND, they didn't seem interested in trying to fix the problem.

I decided to file a complaint through Paypal because not only did they have my business haulted, but they also had taken another payment when I couldn't even use the system.

I received an email from a payloadz developer email address, which stated that I had made false claims and that they had suspended my account. The person didn't sign the emails, but the person was quite unprofessional and didn't want to even look into what had been going on the last month. The person claimed that they had copies of logs that showed I was able to upload to their service. Fortunately, I had taken screen shots of what the screens looked like and also, there were no responses to the last 7-8 emails I had sent looking for assistance.

Within 5 minutes of my posting the pictures and data to this person, I received a refund for my $29.00 and they deleted my account.

I am not sure where Payloadz people come from, but where I come from customer service is top priority. I cannot even imagine why someone would become so irate at ME because I was pointing out that the service was not working properly. Wouldn't you want to know that if you were selling this service?

I did post a reply to the person at the same email address, and apparently I was blocked so the person didn't have the benefit of receiving my timeline email that explained I had tried for over a month to resolve the matter amicably. Payloadz service has gone down hill, and I do not recommend their service to anyone. If you read their terms of service, they can delete your account for any reason at any time without warning. That should be a clue right there that they just want your money.

I did attempt to call the phone number listed on the Payloadz ABOUT US page, and it was a recording that said they were not able to take calls. Nobody from Payloadz called me back, or attempted to remedy the problem. Their quick fix was to threaten me, insult me, and destroy my store. Not a good recommend!

At this point, I am in a spot because I really need to be able to autorespond my product to my customers. I can use Zencart, and I hope that will work.

Kris Caluwaerts says

Payloadz support is indeed terrible. I tried to open an account with them in June and after several attempts, almost 2 months later, just gave up. At first I just was not able to complete all my fields in the profile as they were having problems with their new servers. (that's what I got back from support). When those problems finally were solved, about one month later, I could complete my profile and upload the files. When I then tried to buy them myself as a test I discovered that their buying proces was not working. Different error messages that didn't make sense. Again a message to support which stayed unanswered. Another message about a week later, still no reply. At that moment I decided to switch to e-junkie and I don't regret it. When I first decided to open an account I did choose for Payloadz as they look more professional but is was a wrong impression.

Lauren says

Thank you to everyone for your thoughts here in this forum.

Ok .. Payloadz isn't the place to be. We all, including me, agree on that. After I read the comments here, about a month ago, I signed up with e-junkie. My issue is .. there's no "storefront." Just a page with a list of your e-products. (mine are e-books) Am I missing something? Is there a way to build a decent looking storefront on e-junkie?

If not, does anyone know of a system similar to Payloadz, where you can build a "store?"

I noticed someone mentioned Kiqlo. I've got that web site open in another browser right now and am going to research it. But wanted to check on creating a "store" on e-junkie before moving everything .. again.

Thanks to all......!

Lauren says

Still doing research ........

ClickBank looks pretty darn interesting, if anyone is interested in researching this site. Has anyone used this service? I'm going to continue reading about it. They have a LOT of info. to go through. If it looks viable, I'll report back for anyone who might be interested in something like this..........

Robin says

Lauren, you can create a store on e-junkie. See an example at http://www.e-junkie.com/johntunger

All you need to do is to pick a store name in E-junkie Seller Admin > Profile

John says

I have to agree with all the negatives about Payloadz. I just opened an account with them...and already they're ignoring my requests for help. I emailed their tech support and rec'd nothing back. With all the bad press, here and elsewhere, I'm going to bail.

I hear BitBuffet.com is a new...and good...alternative. And I have no relations with them...

Sally says

Am I ever glad I did a review search on Payloadz. Thanks for all the info. Anyone have a cheap service to recommend for selling a $2 pdf file, and probably not many of them? I don't think I want to try even a $5/mo service charge! Looking into Kiqlo, just wondering about others. Thanks!

John Pansini says

I will be selling my ebook online, and I was seriously considering Payloadz. That was until I read this column.

Many thanks to all of you.

rffr says

Thanks! I've been uber disappointed with Payloadz. Thought it was just me, but after reading the experiences of others...I feel validated! Thanks everyone!

Anon Emous says

Ditto on Payloadz being poor service. Product upload fails. No response to my inquiry. I started with a "free" account but get nag screens continually about upgrading.