Have any other developers been seeing this?
I’ve received emails from 4 different plugin users reporting this within the last 2 months.
It is possible that this is user error on the part of the users (like perhaps they somehow signed up for subscriptions via 2 different Adobe Accounts) however I find that idea suspect. The reason for that is: I have other software products not hosted on the Adobe Exchange with a comparable number of subscriptions, and I have never once had a single user ever report an instance of duplicate subscriptions/payments, leading me to believe this is a flaw in the Adobe system itself that is causing/allowing this to happen.
3 of the email chains I have on this specific matter included Adobe Order ID numbers which can allow for robust troubleshooting into these problems. Who can I pass this information along to at Adobe who can investigate this to see whether there’s some systemic problem causing duplicate subscriptions? (To clarify, I’m not asking for mere customer support help along the lines of “help this user get this problem sorted out”, I already passed these individual cases along to the Adobe Exchange Support Team to help resolve the issues for the users; I’m asking if somebody can actually investigate whether there’s a systemic problem in the Adobe Exchange plugin subscription system itself that is causing/allowing this to happen when it shouldn’t be happening.)
Additionally, it is worth stopping to ask the following question: Why is the Adobe Exchange / Creative Cloud system not able to simply detect whether a given user/email address/Creative Cloud user/payment method has a subscription to a plugin already? Keeping track of subscriptions, ensuring people aren’t being double-subscribed / double-charged for the same software subscription, this seems like a very very basic and fundamental thing to do as part of any software business. None of my own independent software products have ever had this problem, so why can a company as large and resourceful as Adobe not get this right?
If anybody on the Adobe Team finds this issue to be alarming and would like to investigate it, I would be happy to pass along whatever information I have about this matter. And I would be interested to hear if other plugin developers on these forums have heard of similar issues with their plugins/users recently.
(ALSO sidebar point: 1 of these 4 users left a scathing 1-star review on my plugin listing page because of this issue. So yeah, not only is this impacting the users this happens to, but it’s also impacting the plugin developers who end up looking bad for something that utterly isn’t their fault at all. Definitely not an ideal developer experience.)