A very angry user has been waiting 3 weeks for a refund. *What does it take* to get the Adobe Exchange Support Team's attention?

Plugin Marketplace
1

I’ve griped on the forums before about the excessive customer-support delays I’ve experienced from the Adobe Exchange Support Team (see this post here, for example), and this continues to be a problem for Plugin Developers.

An example follows, just to detail the sort of headaches Plugin Developers have to experience as a result of these delays:

I have one user who somehow had a bunch of duplicate charges incurred for my Photoshop Plugin, through the Adobe Exchange’s FastSpring payment portal, and he first reached out on 4/3/2026 requesting refunds for these. FastSpring provided all necessary information required to refund these duplicate payments (including the exact Order Reference IDs for all of the duplicates) on 4/10/2026. Today is 4/25/2026 and the Adobe Exchange Support Team has still not provided the requested refunds.

During this time period I’ve sent follow-up e-mails on this matter, I’ve marked emails as “High Importance”, email subject lines sent by myself and the plugin user in question have included words like “URGENT”, yet we’ve not received any response back on this. Additionally, during this time period, the plugin user in question is justifiably very upset about this situation and the outrageous delays he’s experiencing in getting these refunds – and he’s threatening to do a bunch of chargebacks for these payments, and he’s even hinted at the possibility of taking legal action because of the situation.

A few key points I’d like to make here:

  1. These excessive Adobe Exchange Support Team delays create tons of needless customer-support headaches for Plugin Developers. Taking several weeks to respond to routine requests like “refund these payments please” is ridiculous and creates a terrible experience for developers who have to depend upon them for such actions. It also creates a terrible experience for users of the Adobe Exchange who install plugins then are forced to wait weeks and weeks for resolutions to matters like this.

  2. Even when emails are marked as “URGENT”, “High Importance”, even when repeated follow-ups are sent, even when the individual plugin user emailing them is clearly very angry about the delays in the emails – and is even threatening chargebacks or potential legal action – there seems to be nothing that can be said, done, or communicated that gets the emails sent to the Adobe Exchange Support Team treated with the sense of urgency that they deserve. This seems to indicate a lack of the basic ability to triage, prioritize, and evaluate which emails demand rapid attention by the Adobe Exchange Support Team.

  3. This wastes the time of Plugin Developers – time that could/be spent growing our plugin business and earning both ourselves and our Adobe partners more income. Instead of focusing on marketing and improving my products, I’m having to respond to these angry emails, I’m sending repeated follow-ups on matters that are being ignored or taking weeks to get a response on, and my time is spent on things like this where there should just be a quick, simple resolution.

  4. This leads to Plugin Developers getting bad reviews on their Adobe Exchange plugin listing pages, for situations that are entirely outside of their control where it’s actually the Adobe Exchange Support Team dropping the ball and failing to provide timely support for routine requests like these. Individual plugin users may not understand the precise nuances of the Plugin Developer vs. Adobe Exchange vs. FastSpring relationship, and which party is responsible for and in control of what, and plugin users who experience outrageous and frustrating delays like these may therefore take what they think is the appropriate action of leaving a bad review on our plugin pages even if we’re not at fault for the situation that has them frustrated.

If there’s somebody on the Adobe Team in a position of management who can take action on these matters, and who can take these problems seriously, it would be greatly appreciated by all plugin developers. I can confidently say that such frustrations make plugin developers like myself think twice about building any additional plugins / products / businesses around the Adobe Exchange marketplace, given all the headaches that come from this dependency on the Adobe Exchange Support Team. I have even repeatedly considered just entirely moving my plugin business off of the Adobe Exchange platform, and self-hosting on a website where I control everything, purely so I don’t have to deal with these headaches.

This has been my experience, and I hope somebody at Adobe who can do something about it will take it seriously.

2

Just do that. Marketplace is there for decade or two and during that time there were only brief moments when Marketplace got care and improvements from Adobe when it occasionally had product manager until they fled. After which there were periods of neglect. If you want to have serious income from plugin sales you really have to move the licensing and payment part elsewhere. Where you can make discount codes yourself, see customers contact details and refund with few clicks. E.g. if someone has issue and I sold via Gumroad I can see if that particular person has valid license, price paid, date, name, e-mail etc.

For this particular case I would just send money via PayPal as direct payment. Not great for accounting and if you want to scale sales but happy customers are important as well. The problem is he could likely use plugin until canceled by Adobe.

In Gumroad it takes 20 seconds to find sale and 7 seconds to refund and deactivate license. I already did that several times when plugin failed in some PS / OS combination and I it was not worth it to maintain plugin anymore.

3

Yes the lack of visibility on basic analytics, traffic-source attribution, and customer information is another major drawback to developing on the Adobe Exchange platform. I also had the wonderful pleasure, when I first launched my plugin about 1.5 years ago, of requesting that a 1-month-free-trial coupon code be created for my plugin (since someone at Adobe needs to create these for you, as plugin developers don’t have the ability to make these themselves), and what they instead created for me by some terrible mistake was a “free forever” coupon code that I only discovered months later after the revenue numbers I was seeing just didn’t make any sense – LOL.

4

It’s my understanding that there is a contractual obligation to give refunds within a short window of time…

Just to be clear; which email address are you using to reach out to for Exchange support?

5

From behind the scenes it sounds like this was a complicated case that took extra time to investigate, but now it’s resolved. Let me know if it’s not.