TechnoMagicians Blog

I can't believe the hoops I'm having to jump through to order a $7.99 piece of software. Obviously the folks at SipPhone have no clue about ecommerce or web usability. I suggest they start with Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think and go from there.

He is what I've gone through so far. Fumble around their website trying to figure out how to order their Xten X-Pro 2.0 softphone software. Something like “Purchase Now” or “Buy” would be much better than “Available on MySipphone Store”. Ok, so I click over there. It takes me to some bogus page advertising stuff I'm not interested in. Nowhere does it explain whats going on. I have to assume that I need to register in order to goto this MySipphone Store. So I attempt to register. It then asks me for all this info from a purchase I've made from them. Um, no, I'm trying to purchase something, not fill in my product info etc. Ah, there is a link at the bottom of the page for us folks that haven't purchased something from them. I almost missed it.

Now they present me with one of these absolutely asinine security images. Look at this crap:

Can someone tell me what that 1st or 5th number is? It isn't a 5, 6 or anything else because nothing I tried worked. What kind of ridiculous crap is this anyway? It took me 6 tries to get past this and I only did because it finally came up with an image without this mystery number in it.

Ok, so I finally get past that and have to wait for an email as a confirmation. At least I received that in under a minute and I clicked on the link to verify the registration. Unfortunately it then said I had to wait for yet another email with my password. Why they can't just display it on the webpage I'll never figure out. That email took about 10 mins to get to me while I stared at the login page like a moron.

Ah, finally I get to login to my.sipphone.com to order my software. I'm presented with all kinds of crap I'm entirely not interested in and have to search for the shop link. Remember, about 20 minutes ago I clicked on a link to buy a specific piece of software. My guess is I'll have to find it again.

Well, at least it was easy to find. Now, I click on the link to purchase and guess what. I get some lousy message saying I haven't tested my account yet. I couldn't care about my SipPhone account. I don't want an account. I just want to purchase this software. What a joke.

I decide I've had enough of this and call their phone number. I'm presented with a couple menu choices and then dropped into a voice mail box before I'm able to make a choice. I hang up after pressing numbers for a while. I suspect some moron will get a voice message with a bunch of tones. I couldn't be bothered to leave a message.

Its pretty simple at this point. I give up trying to purchase this. Problem is I haven't found any other SIP softphone that works. Anyone have any recommendations? It has to support G.729 at the very least and work with any SIP provider I'd like to plug into it.

Update: You'll want to see this entry for the followup to this.

• Delicious
• Delicious