Why Won't You Let Me Give the Gift of Smugmug?

Ok, so here is the story. I have some friends that are having a baby soon so I thought a good Christmas gift to give them would be a subscription to a photo sharing web site so they could share all their photos of them and their new child. Since I have a Flickr pro account and love it, I figured I would get them a Flickr account. But then I read about Robert Scoble raving about how much he loves Smugmug and that he is possibly moving from Flickr to Smugmug. So I decided to give Smugmug a try.

On Trial

So I signed up for a trial account with Smugmug and just browsed around to get a general feel for the site. I really like the site and they have a done a wonderful job of making it easy to perform most of the common tasks that a photo sharing site should enable you to do.

I talked it over with my wife and we both agreed that Flickr is more techy while Smugmug is more family friendly. Since we wanted a site which would allow our friends to share baby photos with their family, Smugmug seemed like a really good choice.

A Snafu

So I searched around the Smugmug site and finally found a page where you can "give the gift of Smugmug" so I decided I would go ahead with that. One problem though, when I reached the gifting page, I was greeted with a blank page. Hmmm. That's strange. Maybe it is my browser. So I tried it in Firefox. Same thing. Try it for yourself, here is the Url:

https://www.smugmug.com/gift.mg

Then, I remembered that Smugmug is a family owned business and they boast that they have really personal and friendly support. So I wrote those wonderful humans at help@smugmug.com.

Warm, but not very helpful

I wrote support and explained that I was getting a blank page in both browsers when trying to give the gift of Smugmug. I received a response a couple of days* later that basically consisted of the usual support response: Clear your browser cache, delete all of your cookies, and restart your computer. Ok, that is to be expected. It seems that in technical support you have to start with the most basic things first. I knew it wouldn't help but I decided to try it anyway. Well, it didn't help. I was still getting a blank page.

Update: After going back and checking the timestamps on the emails with Smugmug support, the response actually came the next day and from then on out they responded to all of my emails within a couple of hours except for my very last message to them which was never responded to.

Next, I tried it at a different computer (from work) and again, in both browsers. Same results. So I replied to support and told them this and asked if they had any other ideas. The response I received really puzzled me:

Thanks for contacting SmugMug. To give the 'Gift of SmugMug' you must have a current / active account with us and have credit card information in the control panel of your account. Check to make sure you have updates your account billing information.

Well, I guess I don't mind giving them my credit card information since I will need to be paying for this gift. So I went to my user settings on Smugmug and went to update my credit card information. Well, in order to enter credit card information, I must sign up for my own Smugmug account and pay for it. Ok, so let me get this straight. To give somebody else a gift, I must fist purchase an account for myself? But I am perfectly happy with my Flickr account and I don't need to pay another fee for a site I may or may not use.

In A Tight Spot

So now here I am, three days after Christmas and I still have not been able to purchase a Christmas gift for my friends. My first reaction was to just back out and give them a Flickr account. But my wife insisted we get them a Smugmug account - it is prettier. So what do I do? At this point I don't feel like I am getting much help from Smugmug. I am trying to give them money and they won't take it.

Why Blank?

Ok, so maybe they haven't really set up a way for non-members to give others gifts. Maybe this is even a business rule they decided to enforce on their web site. But why not explain this on the page rather than just giving me nothing? Here is what the code for that page must look like:

if(User.IsPayingCustomer)
{
     DisplayGiftForm();
}
else
{
     DisplayBlankPage();
}

Makes no sense to me. I must be missing something.