Archive for the ‘To Avoid’ Category

It was brought to my attention that Alstrasoft has launched a new website as Revou, offering a Twitter script knockoff.

For those not familiar with Alstrasoft, read up on Alstrasoft’s history here. Alstrasoft is notorious for horrible customer support (as in they don’t support their software after you buy it).

It pretty much goes without saying that there are about to be a bunch of poor webmasters getting a bug filled script and no customer support thanks to Revou. For all you guys that go down this road, please feel free to post your comments here.

I imagine eventually the site will have privacy guard on the whois, so for those of you looking for support a couple months down the road, this is who owns the domain at this moment:

ReVou
John Goh (gohkaiwei@gmail.com)
+65.00000000
Fax: +1.5555555555
14 Robinson Road #13-00
Far East Finance Building
Singapore, SG 048545
SG

I purchased a simple keyword research script for $10 from Alstrasoft, to use in digging for keywords.

I was quickly drawn to their suite of applications that were near clones of major sites like Youtube and Myspace. I had been searching for similar scripts and knew there weren’t many with these immense feature sets. I signed up as an affiliate and began to send traffic. Within a short period of time I had made more than a few sales. I checked my account over and over for 3 months, thinking I would eventually be credited. Alstrasoft never paid me.

I contacted their support team (6/26/2007) and within hours a Mike Terry had replied back to me that he would look into it. Mike Terry never sent me another email. Nobody from Alstrasoft ever returned an email to me, even after multiple (6 requests) attempts to every address on their site. The 800 number on their website was even dead!

I started researching their company and realized I wasn’t the only person they quit communicating with abruptly… unhappy customers were coming out of the woodwork on forums…

• Alstrasoft Efriends Nightmare
• Alstrasoft Efriends - take a look at the customer reviews!
• Alstrasoft Videoshare Enterprise Nightmare
• Alstrasoft support coming up short
• Alstrasoft Efriends - “You Have Been Warned” - Webbizideas.com
• Alstrasoft.com shut down for copyright issues - “You Have Been Warned” - UnitHosting.net
• Alstrasoft Efriends Hacked - no support to be found (for more on this, google “alstrasoft security“)

Are you ready for the cherry on top? Alstrasoft sells an affiliate network script “Affiliate Network Pro” … but if you sign up as an Alstrasoft Affiliate you will see they are using “aMember Pro” to actually run their affiliate program! Check the screenshot if you want to forgo the signup process.

It is hard to believe that a company could put so much effort into building a legitimate storefront and then piss it all away with poor customer service, but Alstrasoft has championed the cause!

If you ever see anyone online questioning the legitimacy of any Alstrasoft script, feel free to quote from or lead them to this post.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Alstrasoft shut down their site and re-open under a new brand sometime in the future… and if they do please let me know.

Companies that blatantly disregard their customers like this, must be held accountable.