We appreciate your feedback and concern, so allow us this opportunity to explain the rationale behind our support policy. Most Internet-based companies (including rather major ones like Authorize.Net) also do not offer live phone support either, for very good reasons which have nothing to do with being greedy or miserly, although finances are certainly involved. It's a simple matter that providing cost-no-object superlative support doesn't count for much if it winds up driving you out of business.
Put it this way: Would you be willing to pay twice as much for your E-junkie service, if that meant being able to talk to someone at E-junkie on the phone? How about three times as much? Ten times? How about our other 7000+ merchants; do you suppose all of them would be willing to pay that much, even those who would never want or need to call?
It appears you would have joined way back when E-junkie was still largely a "one man band", so the "tech support guy" you may have spoken with then probably would have been E-junkie's Founder and now Lead Developer. One might say that support provided directly by the same guy who actually programmed the service is about as good as one can get, but that level of support simply can't be sustained if E-junkie is to grow to a self-sufficient scale. Eventually, E-junkie started growing so fast that he wound up spending his every waking hour on support, leaving no time to improve the actual service itself, so he hired me and then other support staff to help him meet those demands.
We briefly tried offering live phone support about a year and a half ago and very quickly found that, not only could most problems not be solved effectively over the phone due to the highly technical nature of our service (e.g., because of the need to provide text-based information such as HTML code examples, links to help pages, step-by-step instructions, etc.), but also the amount of time required to communicate by phone took at least double or triple the time to handle the very same issue via email (e.g., it took a 30+ minute phone call to impart the same information as 10-15 minutes writing an email). We were already each spending 8 hours a day, every day, continuously writing support emails as things stood already, so it's not as if we were sitting around with spare time and nothing to do but take phone calls; indeed, quite the contrary. From this experiment, we realized there's a tradeoff involved between pricing and support.
In order to provide live phone support well and routinely for everyone, we would need to at least double or triple our current staff, so we'd need to raise all of our prices considerably to cover the additional salaries (not to mention additional equipment, office furniture, phone bills, leasing a larger office, etc.). Such a drastic price increase would drive away many-to-most of our existing clientele (most of whom are subscribed within our lowest half-dozen or so plan tiers), meaning the remaining clients would need to pay even more to make up that lost revenue, so you can see how this path becomes a downward spiral. Charging separately for phone support on an "a la carte" basis is not an option, either, as the recent bad PR and mass-exodus from a competitor who started that policy amply demonstrates.
It's not possible to be everything to everybody, so there are some dilemmas where we have to decide who and what we really are, pick a side accordingly and stick with it, despite what we may have to give up from the path not taken. We can either be an affordable service primarily for do-it-yourselfers with adequate text-based email/forum support (like we have now), or we could try to reorient ourselves as an exorbitant "boutique service" for cost-no-object clients which would allow us to offer phone-based live support that cannot really solve actual problems any more effectively, making that an expensive but ultimately empty courtesy.
Since we have already thus far specialized in providing services to independent and small businesses with modest budgets, rather than big corporations and other clients with deep pockets, we have opted to remain affordable first and foremost, to help "empower the little guys" going into business for themselves. For the few clients who actually require more live, personal assistance than we can provide within our target price points, we can refer them to a third-party service like EasyE-junkie.com where the cost to provide that service is borne directly by the clients who actually require and use it.
