I am writing for a friend of mine who attempted to buy and load Cubase Artist 15 onto her brand new Apple laptop.
Everything went swimmingly until she got to the “enter email and password’“ part of the process. When she’d hit Enter, Steinberg’s authorization section kept refusing to accept her email as a valid email. we tried 3 times and the email address was refused all 3 times. This is her address, she’s had it for years. gmail, in case you’re wondering.
We gave up on the authorization process and canceled the credit card purchase until we get some kind of response from Steinberg.
Anyone have a clue why the process would reject a valid email address?
I’ve actually tried the support areas…all of which provide no way to explain this to the correct person resulting in a loop back to this forum.
The error message specifically said the email address was invalid? Does she have a My Steinberg account with the same address, and can she log into that without any issues?
I believe it was the process of setting up the account itself where the failure occurred. This is part of the purchasing process….so we couldn’t get past that part. For some reason, Steinberg is convinced it is an invalid address. I can assure you, it isn’t. I have feelers out elsewhere in Steinberg world and I’ll wait to see what kind of responses I get about this. Thanks for responding.
Oh…if only. I was sitting right next to her as she went through the process. This is an issue created by the company currently doing Steinberg’s US sales: FastSpring.
Are you sure it was Steinberg–not their 3rd-party reseller FastSpring? If she was trying to buy the software directly from the Steinberg website, I would recommend not doing that, and finding a better reseller.
Yep. It is Fastspring that you are steered to from the Steinberg website.
Once we have ascertained her credit card charge has been cancelled (which by all appearances, went through the process) and confirmed, we will explore purchasing though Sweetwater, another Steinberg reseller.
Regarding FastSpring. I just spent 10 minutes navigating their site to find the place the actual problem could be discussed. Quite a minefield of nonsense before you get to a area that lets you explain the problem clearly. I can’t wait to see the explanation as to why they think the email address is invalid.
Hi,
this has happened before: For unknown reasons, FastSpring is blacklisting email adresses out of nowhere. It will take some time to get a response from FastSpring to un-blacklist this email adress.
Easy workaround: use any other email adress of yours when you pick the payment method. The purchase at FastSpring has absolutely nothing to do with your Steinberg account. You will get a Download Access Code via mail which is NOT associated with Steinberg.
Open the Steinberg Download Manager should and enter the Download Access Code here. From now on, your product is associated with your Steinberg account.
Sweetwater is legit. They actually know what they’re doing and they have good customer service.
I had the same problems.
There’s no way I’d open a support case with FastSpring just to make a purchase on steinberg.com. Steinberg is their customer–not me. They should be the ones dealing with their payment-processing problems.
I did a search of invalid email addresses occurring with FastSpring and I was surprised at the amount of articles there were by FastSpring on the subject. The fact that there were so many doesn’t bode well with me. Real red flag stuff.
I purchased something from Steinberg today via FastSpring using Paypal. In this case, the requested email adress must be associated to your PayPal account, same applies for the name I guess. As I said: The email adress associated with your MySteinberg account doesn’t have to be the same. If it’s the same email account associated with both your PayPal and MySteinberg account, well, in that case it’s credit card I guess.
If you want to buy a new Cubase version and not an update/upgrade you don’t have to deal with FastSpring at all. Just saying. Loads of legit vendors and websites selling Cubase.
I did the research on all of this. Purchase will be made through another reseller. We won’t be going through FastSpring.
The fact that FastSpring made it extremely difficult to locate a support email address to explain and rectify the issue (claiming an invalid email address during registration after taking the credit card payment) and further explaining that it make take a day or two for a reply is more than enough reason to purchase Cubase through a reputable and customer friendly reseller rather than directly through Steinberg’s website.
I’ve had my fair share of suboptimal experience with the Fastspring “support”, too. Many mails trying to explain my problem to someone in first level who clearly never understood the problem, had to escalate it at one point, then it worked.
Since this email blacklist issue has been present for quite some time now FastSpring’s support team should have heard of the problem and handle it accordingly and fast.
If you got the choice to purchase Cubase elsewhere - that’s probably the best way to let FastSpring’s support know that you are not happy with their service. Good for you!