Oliver F.

I signed up for the "all features included" free trial. Not to test their storage features, but to actually sell something and see how smooth this goes.

My first visual impression wasn't really good. Everything looked somewhat amateurish and navigating through the page was way less intuitive than I know it from other similar websites. I would describe the look and feel of the page as outdated, but I guess one can get used to it.
After setting up a gallery and sharing the link with my buyer, she placed an order and everything went it's way: my buyer ordered and payed, As usual SmugMug subtracted the printing costs as well as their own processing fees from the amount she payed. So I went ahead and filled in my information so I can get my share. However, I never received a payment. No money, no note from SmugMug, nothing, just silence.

I contacted SmugMug support to notify them about the missing payment. Here is the answer I got:

"... Let me explain: your account is a trial account that has never been paid for. In order to get paid, you need to sign up and pay for your account so we can then send you your profit..."

I went back to the Terms of Use to read them again and see what I've missed before signing up, but couldn't find anything about that. I signed up for an "all featured included" trial during which I was able to sell and was able to fill in my payment information. I earned money during the trial, and now SmugMug is sitting on my money unwilling to give it to me unless I give them $20 or whatever such a pro account costs. However, during my trial I decided that I don't like it, so why should I sign up?

I strongly disagreed with them and started a longer email discussion during which they defended themselves by telling me that the information about the required pro account is given on their help page. While trying to explain to them that

- it is not okay to hide costs on a help page and not mention it in the Terms of Use,
- they should disable the sales features for trial members,
- they could at least implement a warning on their website, letting a user know when leaving the free trial area,
I kept getting arrogant lines like this:

"Please be sure to check out the complete Pro section of our Help section. It is loaded with easy to understand information."

How do you dare doing this while sitting on someone else's money?
After spending hours writing emails to SmugMug and defending my point, they told me that I would receive my money after waiting for it for 4 months.

My common sense tells me to stay away from anyone who acts like this, and I recommend you to do the same. It just leads to trouble sooner or later. This was a very insightful trial.