I ordered a copy of LR3 when Adorama had it on offer (US$79.95, Valentine's day special, 14th Feb), with free shipping within the US. I shipped it to my comGateway address and had it shipped back to SG for US$12.86. Total cost: ~S$116.
Adorama was oversold on the special price, and by the time they restocked and my LR3 arrived in SG (12th Mar), LR4 was already released. With the new pricing for LR4, I was 'in shock'. At that point, I decided to upgrade to LR4 at a later time.
Mar 26th: I was itching to get LR4, so I went to Adobe SEA website. Once there, I saw that there was a free shipping offer til Apr 1st, so I decided to place my order. Order placed. Confirmation email received.
In the email, it was stated in bold that if you ordered the Creative Suite, you may be eligible for a free upgrade to CS6 in the near future. I thought to myself: How about LR? Does this policy apply as well?
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| Order Confirmation Email |
Curious, I followed the link and read everything. Then, I contact Adobe Live Support. To my surprise, I was eligible for the free upgrade!!! All I had to do was provide him with my serial number and the invoice for my purchase and he will be able to send me the upgrade. As I was not home and do not have my serial with me, he opened a case for me to update (case 1). Then came the next issue: I need to cancel the order I just made. Live Support was not really good with this. He kept saying the order number I provided him was not valid. Adobe orders begin with ADxxxxxx. He simply refused to accept the reference number.
As I wanted to cancel the order quickly, I confirmed with him about the contact number in the email to call. Everything checked, I 'released' him and proceeded to call Adobe Customer Service.
The call was routed to somewhere out there on earth, and I was told the same thing by the lady on the phone: my order reference is invalid, and that I did not order from Adobe's website. I stood my ground and told her to check: "I visited the Adobe SEA website, not the US site. This is the order reference that came in my mail. It can't be any other distributors/resellers, please check." She decided to put me on hold and talk to someone. Good move. Seems like the other guy knows something. When she returned to my call, she had already cancelled my order, and I was able to confirm it by logging into my Adobe account. However, she was not able to confirm whether my credit card has been charged, so it ended up with another open case (case 2). I monitored my bank statements for the next days and the good thing was, the order was cancelled, and I was not being charged.
Case 2 closed, Case 1 was updated as soon as I got back home. It took Adobe support quite a while before someone took up Case 1 again (4th Apr). The update stated that they have verified my serial and approved the free upgrade.
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| Upgrade approved |
I am, however, to provide them with my serial number (again?!), shipping details and contact number so that they can ship the item to me. I was taken aback by this request as according to my Adobe account, these details are already there. I proceeded to respond and questioning why there was a need to supply these info, since they can already retrieve it, but there was no reply to this question. And for shipping: I actually asked if they are going to ship me the CD or just provide me with the serial. Response I got:
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| LR4 Upgrade Shipped! |
Kudos to Adobe for having this "Post Announce Upgrade" program. This will keep their sales volume up, even when a new version is about to be released. =)
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