Customers Reporting Download Problems

[gaba]

Recently I've had a lot of customers emailing telling me that when they go to download their purchase it never starts the download process or it gets to a point and then freezes. This is happening about once every three of four customers.



I have another e-junkie account which has this problem reported sometimes but nowhere near to this degree.



The file in question is nearly 60MB (and I can't condense it any more) so I can appreciate it's quite big but I'm not going over any e-junkie limit so that really shouldn't make a difference.



Any help fixing this would be appreciated.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Hm, we haven't had any other reports from other merchants of similar issues lately, nor any other indication of a general problem with our download system, though of course it's impossible to guarantee a perfect download experience for every user every time, due to the many variables inherent to Internet networking that are out of our hands.



Does this happen every time affected buyers retry their link, or if they try Resuming a stalled download? Are any buyers reporting that they get an expired link message when they try to start their download? Looking through your Transaction Log, it doesn't appear that many of your buyers are maxing out all the Attempts you allow on their links, so that would seem to rule out link expiration.



You might suggest that affected buyers try disabling their antivirus scanner and any download accelerator/manager toolbar/add-on their browser may be using, in case those may be interfering with the download process somehow; they can re-enable their antivirus after the download is complete and then scan the file manually before opening it if they wish.



Please email our Support team with some affected Transaction IDs that we can pass along to Development for further investigation; it would also help if you could get details from affected buyers about their browser program and any antivirus software they may be using:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php

[luftrum]

+1 to what Gaba wrote.



I am experiencing the exact same problem or at least my customers are. Files (in the 200MB - 500MB range) are stopping halfways in download but still being saved as complete .zip files resulting in corrupted files. I tried yesterday myself, and confirmed there is a download problem.



I have never had any issues before.

[gaba]

From what my customers are saying they're trying out the link a number of times (although not maxing out their limit which I've set to 9) and each time they try it's not working. I've found after four or five attempts that's when they typically email me.



Then I send them a new link which sometimes works, there's been times though when I've had to send three or four new links before they've been able to download their purchase successfully.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Luftrum, we responded to your related email about this matter and found that we could download your file without any problem via our office ISP connection, which is a consumer-grade connection unrelated to our server provisions.



You can also test for yourself the actual download link(s) issued to any specific buyer. Just go to Seller Admin > View/Download Transaction Log and click the Transaction ID for any order in the log, or the Item Name of any digital item in that order. That will bring up the thank-you page we generated for that buyer and their purchased item(s), where you can test their download links. Note that your own test would count against the number of download Attempts you permit on that link.



If you test the link and find it works fine for you, that indicates the cause of any download problem must be with the buyer's computer or ISP connection, or possibly a routing glitch somewhere along the path across the Internet between their ISP and the Amazon S3 servers that we use for long-term download storage and delivery. This help page covers the matter in more detail:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/trouble.downloads.slow-stalled.htm

[rogere]

Having the same basic problem. Message from my customer:



"I’ve purchased the Four File Collection but cannot download them. I tried at work, at home, and on my son’s new computer running Windows 7. In all cases the download never appears to start. No estimated time of completion, no transfer rate. Now my File says it has expired."



From my perspective my customer did everything correct.



BTW: Why is there no cursor in this forum software?

[E-junkie_Monster]

Hi,



Have you tested the link yourself as described above? You would need to reactivate the link since it has been expired, or you can send the buyer a new one, but you have the ability to test the same link yourself to verify whether or not it is working should a buyer have problems.



That doesn't mean that your buyer isn't having a hard time, but it will demonstrate that the problem doesn't lie with the link itself but with something on the buyer's end of the connection that is out of your control or ours. It is quite possible for an individual to have a poor internet connection to some sites and servers and not others, that's just the nature of the internet. Trying different connections (such as work versus home) is a good way around the problem, so is trying at different times of day.





As for the cursor issue, "forum software" doesn't provide cursors, that would be something related to your browser or operating system itself.

[rogere]

E-JunkieMonsterHi,



Have you tested the link yourself as described above? You would need to reactivate the link since it has been expired, or you can send the buyer a new one, but you have the ability to test the same link yourself to verify whether or not it is working should a buyer have problems.

Yes, I tested it and it downloaded as it should.

That doesn't mean that your buyer isn't having a hard time, but it will demonstrate that the problem doesn't lie with the link itself but with something on the buyer's end of the connection that is out of your control or ours. It is quite possible for an individual to have a poor internet connection to some sites and servers and not others, that's just the nature of the internet. Trying different connections (such as work versus home) is a good way around the problem, so is trying at different times of day.

It get more interesting. I sent my customer a "free" download link to one of the four 300MB files. The exact same link provided in the e-junkie HTML page with four links. My customer had no problem downloading that file. What's different???

As for the cursor issue, "forum software" doesn't provide cursors, that would be something related to your browser or operating system itself.

I've run a lot of forum software over the last 10-years, perhaps 10,000 posts. Never had a missing cursor, intermittent or otherwise. This forum software is totally lacking in basic features I've come to expect. Like a simple post review. There are many great free forum apps out there, why did e-junkie have to invent this buggy and featureless tool?

[E-junkie_Monster]

RogerEMy customer had no problem downloading that file. What's different???

It is generally the case that a buyer who has had difficulty downloading at one point will not have difficulty downloading when they try again later.



For this reason we recommend allowing at least five download attempts so that buyers have opportunity to try several times before they need to contact you for a new link. A small percentage of those buyers may still have to contact you anyway, and refreshing their original link or sending them a new one will do the trick.



Whatever went wrong was outside the factors that we can control. It was either on the buyer's end of the connection directly or possibly just somewhere along the line. Fortunately those kind of connection issues are rarely permanent.

[rogere]

Monster,



My customer had this to say.

Seems to be related to the VPN client I run.

How might that affect a download so I can add that to my tool bag?



Thanks for all your replies.



Roger

[martyinmaui]

Hi all, I couldn't find a place to start a new topic, but this does have to do with downloading product so hope it's ok to post my question here ...



Newbie question - I just tested my set up. I get the email and the link - no problem, but can't access / download my digital product. I realize this may be the idea but I don't see that reference anywhere, so before I go LIVE I just want to make sure there's not a broken link in the system somewhere. Thanks!

[E-junkie_Guru]

Just to clarify how our download delivery feature normally works:



After the buyer finishes checkout and the payment processor confirms the buyer's payment was good and completed, we grant the buyer access to a unique thank-you page we generate for each transaction, where we automatically present the buyer's unique download link(s). We also send the buyer a thank-you email message with a link to reach the thank-you/download page in case they did not proceed to the download page after checkout. Their download link(s) expire after the number of attempts or hours (whichever comes first) that you specify in each product's settings.



It appears you've issued a couple free test links to yourself and attempted a couple downloads on each of those. I tested one of those links myself and received the download without any problem, so perhaps you've already sorted this out yourself by now?



BTW, you can start a new topic by scrolling to the bottom of the topic list in E-junkie Discussions:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/forum/2

[martyinmaui]

Thanks for the response - I read how the downloads work, and I followed the directions to test my system. I'm really puzzled though why you could access the download and I couldn't because I not only tested it on two different emails, I copied and pasted the link into the browser and none of those worked. So no, I'm afraid it's not sorted out - I'll have to take another look today because I don't want to go live with this not feeling confident what will happen with a real purchase. Thanks again,

[E-junkie_Guru]

Did you get any sort of error message when you tried to access the link? If so, copy and paste that error to help us sort out what's actually happening.



Perhaps you just missed part of the link URL when you copied it? Most email readers should automatically hot-link the URL we provide in the thank-you email message, so the buyer would typically just click that linked URL to reach the thank-you page where they can claim their download. Likewise, the "Click here" download link on the thank-you page should simply be clicked, no copy-pasting nor right-clicking required.