Cello

I’m a software business owner and contacted TierPoint about content hosted by them that was unlawfully distributing my copyrighted software.

On 17.12.2024, I submitted a DMCA takedown notice to TierPoint abuse contact with URLs and supporting evidence.

I did not receive any response, and the reported content remained accessible for months after that.

Based on this experience, I found TierPoint to be non-compliant with DMCA and copyright law, and their abuse/takedown handling non-existent.

I ordered a CORE Mask for $45 with $60 shipping to EU (total $105).

The parcel came from China and was falsely declared at 4.32 EUR with no proper invoice ever sent to me. So customs are holding it.

When I contacted Molchanovs support, they only sent slow, generic automated replies and repeatedly asked for the same screenshot of the Chinese postage I had already sent them three times.

Days later, after a lot of back-and-forth with Molchanovs' support over technical issues on their side (missing email attachments and not working embedded PDF links), I received a Chinese “invoice” showing 5 USD total with no vendor/sender details which renders it invalid.

This leaves me in a position where I would have to knowingly submit paperwork that seriously understates the value of the goods to customs + forge a proof of purchase for a matching sum, which I’m not willing to do.

So, my parcel is still stuck at customs, I still don’t have a correct paperwork.

Overall, it's not worth it. Poor handling, huge waste of time and very frustrating experience.

It's a scam. You pass the test and only see the result if you pay. Avoid at any cost.

Not working. I can't even login. Getting the meaningless "Unauthorized - Timestamp Header" error when entering my phone no. and freshly received PIN.

The main issue I’ve encountered with Gumroad is that the platform’s owner seems to prioritize his personal goals over those of anyone else.

This approach has turned Gumroad into a hugely unreliable partner and made it an unpredictable platform. A loose cannon. A weak link in your business stack.

In my years using Gumroad, I’ve faced several major issue:

1. Persistent bugs and UX/UI issues that remained unresolved for years.

2. A high incidence of chargebacks fraudulent buyers compared to my other platforms.

3. Sudden, and very significant Gumroad fee increases, with no appreciation for the highest-earning creators, especially those who were early supporters. Effectively, all top-tier quality quality creators were forced to leave in early 2023.

These experiences suggest a focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term creator relationships.

Spammers. Ignoring request to stop spamming. Reported to Google and EU authorities, blacklisted.

I purchased two Flos In Vitro Unplugged lamps expecting top-tier design and functionality, given their high price.

While the lamps look stunning, their performance is a serious letdown.

The optical sensors are overly sensitive, causing the lamps to turn on unintentionally due to small insects, sunlight, or even movements in the room. This renders the lamps nearly unusable, as they drain their batteries quickly in normal home conditions.

Despite reaching out to Flos support, I was informed that the sensor sensitivity cannot be adjusted, with no viable solution offered. For such an expensive product, this kind of design flaw is unacceptable. Aesthetic beauty aside, I cannot recommend these lamps due to their fundamental design flaw.

Promotes tampering with vehicle odometer, which is illegal in EU according to The European Parliament and the Council have adopted Directive 2014/45/EU

The mobile app is slow, poorly designed and inefficient to the degree of being unusable. The phone support is just awful - a lot of poorly implemented automation with speech recognition unable to recognise even the simplest answers like YES or NO. As a result you have to interact with this bank a lot, and each interaction turns into a huge waste of time, often turning into a Kafkian-style bureaucratic nightmare.

On the surface SendOwl looks pretty reasonable with its $15–40 of monthly fee and $0.04–0.03 per transaction, in addition to your Stripe fees.

What's not so obvious however, is that the Stripe tariff SendOwl will apply is not the same tariff that you see in your Stripe account.

It's not something SendOwl will show you in its plan comparison but a rather small print below: "2.9% + $0.30 for merchants located in the United States. Add 2% for merchants located outside the United States".

Yes, that's right: with SendOwl you pay 4.9% + $0.30 even for for standard European cards instead of 1.5% + €0.25 that you would have paid if just using Stripe checkout. And don't forget to add SendOwl monthly fee plus $0.04–0.03 per transaction on top.

So, in reality, trading via SendOwl will cost you 6–8% on average, depending on your prices, compared to 3.5–4.5 of Stripe checkout.

What's the takeaway? As usual: be careful, do your own research, do your maths and always read small print.

tried using Shopify for digital products and didn't like it overall.

Poor and obsolete checkout experience with unnecessary friction for the buyer, like entering full billing address - something you can easily avoid with many more modern platforms.

Support is slow and inefficient - looks like outsourced staff who don't care.

I.e. they do reply, but replies take longer than on other platforms, and they also tend to send you canned instructions without reading your description of the issue, so you have to explain the problem again and again until someone understands it or raises with the actual Shopify staff.

Definitely can't recommend.

No response to my support ticket in over a month.

Terrible experience from start, so I can't recommend Sellfy to anyone.

It used to be a customer-focused company but sadly lost its way.

The user interface is deteriorating with each update and there is no way to provide feedback to the company.

For example, right now the playback UI is messed up completely and there's no way to communicate the issue back to the company.

There is no point of contact literally, apart from Elon's twitter. The old feedback email address was taken down and the contact from in the customer portal only takes you to a number of FAQ articles. No way to send a real message.

Packetbunker is a semi-criminal hosting provider offering services to a number of software pirates and other rogue websites, including filenext(dot)com, specialising on trading stolen content.

They tend to turn a blind eye to legal requests. As a result, our company is preparing a lawsuit in order to bring the directors and administrators of Packetbunker to justice for copyright infringement committed knowingly and at a business scale.

I used a unique dedicated email address from a reputable provider to register on Rokslide forums.

Shortly after I started receiving phishing & scam messages to this email en masse.

Loan offers, fake bank letters, and even offers of eight-digit transactions from a mysterious foreign prince.

The only explanation to this is poor user data management (or a complete lack of it) at Rokslide.

It feels like I could even sue and thrash this company if I wanted.

In the meantime - avoid giving them your contacts or card details at any cost.

At the moment our company is preparing a legal action aimed at suing Squarespace directors and administrators for committing copyright infringement knowingly and at a business scale.

Squarespace is offering its platform to software pirates enabling them to host, distribute and process criminal proceedings for pirated software.

Multiple DMCA notices and cease and desist letters from a legitimate copyright owner have been served to Squarespace, however none of them have been answered and the issue with the rogue merchant has not been addressed.

I've been using Gumroad as a primary e-commerce partner for my small business (digital downloads) for a few years now, and here's a summary of my experience with this platform.

Pros:
- Good kit of integrated services.
- Can be easily embedded into any existing website.
- Offers a hosting for your digital downloads.
- Secure product delivery via email.
- Allows generating discount codes.
- Offers some basic email marketing automation for no extra cost: email updates and post-sale followups (Gumroad workflows).
- EU VAT handling (acts as merchant of record).
- Handy realtime sale stats in the dashboard.
- Nice mobile app for merchants (sale stats in realtime).
- Support is reasonably responsive, typically answering within 1 working day.

Cons:
- The platform fees are the highest in the industry: 10% plus payment processing fees starting of Jan 31 2023, which effectively amounts to around 13% of pre-tax commission.
- Checkout experience is pretty horrible - it redirects your buyers to a third-party Gumroad-branded URL.
- No way to remove Gumroad branding from the checkout UI.
- Gumroad never wins fraudulent chargebacks on Stripe. Huge pain, cost us a lot every year.
- Widespread email delivery issues: Gumroad IPs are blacklisted by many free email providers, including online-de names-co-uk and others.
- In addition to the above, even where Gumroad is not blacklisted, its emails still end up in spam way too often, which generates lots of support requests. We ended up writing our own service to deal with it automatically and resend missing emails using our own IPs and AWS.
- Breaking Gumroad changes that affect your buyers or existing website integrations are poorly communicated, often not communicated at all.
- Sometimes Gumroad-hosted product URLs go offline without notice and need constant automated monitoring for that reason.
- Half-baked workflows. Highly requested features are not implemented for ages. For example, sending a followup only to customers who bought product A but not yet bought products B and C is not possible despite being requested for years.
- Support does not always do what you ask them.
- No way to expire or invalidate an order without refunding the buyer. Just ridiculous. You don't want to reward those who steal your products or breach the EULA.

Summary:
Gumroad was a kind-of-ok platform when commission was at around 3% and included payment processing fees (pre Feb'23). But, at 13%, considering all the cons above, it just makes no sense to start or stay on this platform.

There are plenty of alternative platforms around with similar or better functionality and much lower commission.

Personally I won't recommend using any highly-integrated all-in-one platform at all. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Instead choose one service for payment processing, one for checkout, one for hosting&delivery, one for email marketing, etc.

With this approach you'll learn the basics of integration early and be able to easily replace or improve smaller parts of your third-party service stack when they are no longer aligned with the interest of your business.

That's just my opinion as a merchant though.

This photographer is describing himself as "an award-winning international Leica photographer, visionary artist, educator, explorer, and author."

In December'22 he started offering for sale film profiles which he describes as his own. However, after making a purchase I found that those profiles were complete copies of a very well-known product RNI All Films 5, made by RNI and released a couple of years earlier.

Poor conduct of this photographer and the fact of copyright theft have been exposed across a number of Facebook communities and reported to RNI as a rightful owner.

I used a one-time unique email when registering with shouldianswer, and started receiving SPAM to this email a few weeks after.

This shows unambiguously that shouldianswer leaks or sells your personal details to spammers and scammers.

Avoid at any cost.

Wheelit Madeira (using its brand Via Activa), is operating an extremely noisy ATV at Arco da Calheta, behind the sports centre.

Their vehicle has no muffler and produces an absolutely insane amount of violent noise all day long (about 10x louder than a regular motorcycle), not to mention the associated air pollution.

Most of the time it is just a member of Via Activa staff running the ATV in circles, deliberately and totally needlessly producing all the noise and air pollution.

I believe that Via Activa's reckless and inconsiderate operations constitute a case of statutory nuisance, negatively affect the health of kids and wider community and violate the basic right of local residents to enjoy the peace and quiet of their homes.

I also believe it is in the public interest to bring these activities to the attention of the local authority and the police.