And Apple doesn’t care one bit
By Stephen Pate – Apple was able save $1 billion in un-redeemed gift cards in 2013 according to MarketWatch.
Peopl, myself included, treat Apple iTunes gift cards like cash but they are not.
When you buy a iTunes gift card for your partner, children, grandchildren or friends you may be throwing your money away.
Cards are easy to buy at every grocery, pharmacy, or other retailer. Getting the benefit relies on one simple thing – activation by the merchant.
If the merchant make a mistake swiping the gift card at the checkout, Apple makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to redeem the card for music, movies or other iTunes purchases.
Whenever a bad authorization occurs, the person who received the card will have to go back to the donor and ask for their cash register receipt. Yup, your kids will have to chase you for the receipt.
How many people save their grocery receipts for more than a few days, if at all? Without the receipt Apple will not let the card be authorized.
“Please note that in order to replace the inactive gift card code you received,” Apple customer service employees say, “Apple must see a proof of purchase from the retailer that sold the code.”
It doesn’t matter if spend $100’s, $1,000’s or whatever amount on Apple products and services. To Apple you could be a criminal. Without proof you haven’t stolen the card, you are out of luck.
“Please know that all iTunes Store gift cards are inactive until the retailer that owns the codes activates them. In this case, that did not happen when your card was purchased. The owner’s activation is the only way to tell if an iTunes Store card was legitimately purchased within our system. I request you to contact the person who gifted the iTunes Card to obtain the sales receipt.”
Apple’s hard-nosed attitude on customer service is out-of-date. People expect companies, especially Apple, to step up and help when things go wrong.
Apple is a great company. They should work harder at trusting their customers.
For instance, many companies will refund or return gifts, because they know more than 97% of customers are honest. Treating the 97% like the 3% who are not honest is bad for their business.
Amazon will let you see the gift cards that you buy, when they are used, send a reminder email to the recipient to see if they still have it or lost it. You can cancel a card and have a new one issued.
Best Buy don’t hassle customers. My son saved his Best Buy gift cards 4 years of Christmas and bought a new computer last year.
I used to spend about $500 a year on iTunes gift cards until Apple wouldn’t redeem a $25 card from my daughter. Common sense told me I was wasting my money.
Apple needs to get with the new world. The more petty, cheap things they do, the easier it is for people to get the message and move to Android and Samsung.
Timmy
The problems go deeper than just gift cards and also falls into the digital copy code area as well. For instance, many 3D movies are not available for sale in the US anymore because the industry has decided for you that you have no interest in 3D movies. This is obviously not true for everyone. Fortunately, you CAN buy 3D (and even 2D also) Blu-Rays from the UK and other countries that have no region code restriction on them. In fact, 4K Ultra Blu-Rays NEVER have country code restrictions, which is a big improvement for international trade and usefulness in an age where Blade Runner 2049 has an Auro 3D soundtrack in Poland, but not in the US (assuming you have an Auro 3D setup and would like to experience that movie in it).
Hooray!!! You can watch the movie in the US in 3D, after all. But SOME of these movies come with digital copy codes as well! This is where the problem starts.
Sorry, but in most cases, you are out of luck at that point. iTunes, in particularly WILL NOT ACCEPT codes from overseas for US accounts. It used to be true that Ultraviolet codes redeemed through Flixster using a VPN (e.g. Tunnelbear) could be transferred to a US Ultraviolet account when Ultraviolet was linked to a US Flickster account (it would ask you if you wanted to import your UK titles; that then would transfer via Movies Anywhere back to other sites like iTunes and Amazon. That’s great except Flixster is no more (now part of Fandango Now and won’t redeem those titles any longer plus many UK digital codes are iTunes direct only, etc.) For example, I just bought Transformers The Last Knight in 3D from the UK because it was considerably cheaper than buying it here and it has a digital copy code for iTunes (Paramount picture). Apple will not redeem that code for US purchasers, even though you bought and paid for a digital copy in the included price. In order to use it, you must move to the UK and open an Apple iTunes account there.
Theoretically, one COULD create a 2nd account listed as the UK, but you have to give them an address. Of course, you could lie about the address (Apple will not verify it in any way) and downloading any free app to your account will get around the UK bank credit card requirement, allowing you to redeem the UK movie. The problem then is that this digital copy will then sit in your iTunes UK account. You CANNOT view it from your US account. And if you switch accounts to view it, you can only do this ONCE every 6 months (i.e. you can then no longer buy/redeem things in your US account for 6 months). This is to stop you from being a pirate! (a pirate here being defined as someone who simply wants their digital copy the box promises but awful companies like Apple REFUSE TO HONOR based on something as trivial as where it was purchased (even though I purchased it in the US because you can order from Amazon UK all day long from the US; they don’t care or mind that you live in the US. In fact, all but a couple of countries (e.g. Japan is one) will automatically log you in and transfer your account information from the US Amazon site just by logging into Amazon UK or Amazon Germany or wherever. This makes it VERY EASY to buy foreign blu-rays (most of which are not region locked; but even if they are you can still watch them with a region free player or if you rip a digital local copy with something like MakeMKV which strips region codes out entirely even if they are present).
Apparently, Apple doesn’t feel “bad” about you giving them FREE MONEY if you buy a gift card from the wrong country among other things. They don’t won’t give you a refund and they act like it’s just NOT THEIR PROBLEM. Yet when it comes to things Tim Cook cares about (e.g. the gay rights agenda), THEN Apple seems to “care” very much about what happens (unless they’re selling goods to Saudi Arabia in which case they pretend they don’t care one tiny bit because MONEY is more important than civil rights to HYPOCRITES). Generally speaking, you’re better off simply not dealing with corporate thieves at all. Sadly, that is hard to avoid in this digital age where the corporations are always right and you are always wrong. Welcome to the Corporate States of America.