Yes, I have read Train-Sim Steve's post regarding "Help with Dovetail Store Purchase Problems", but nothing there really applies to the problem I'm having. On 31 May, I purchased the TS Norfolk Southern N-Line Route from the "May Madness Sale" e-mail I had received from Dovetail Trains, using my PayPal account. As usual, PayPal immediately sent me a receipt for this transaction: {removed by author} It is now June 1, the Memorial Day holidays are over (and I can't imagine that they had any effect on this transaction), but I have yet to receive the product download. Why not? Please advise! Thanks?
You didn't fill in the Instructions to merchant bit. Perhaps if you had instructed the Merchant to kindly send you the product for which you have paid then you might have received it. Seriously though, not a good idea to leave your address in the picture you posted.
Just for the record, while I'm waiting for a more helpful suggestion, the "instructions to merchant" option didn't show up until the PayPal receipt.
The best advice I can give is to abandon hope with the Dovetail Store - take the loss, move on, and never ever run a transaction through the Dovetail Store ever again. Buy things from Steam instead. It could be months or years before you get a refund, even if you spend hours and hours chasing it (based on other posts that I have read, where DTG just blame one of their third party providers). Pretend that you dropped a ten dollar note down a drain, and that you saw the spawn of Beelzebub eat it and smile at you through the grille in the drain.
Alternatively rather than writing it off, raise a PayPal dispute. It’ll end 1 of 2 ways. Either you will get your code or PayPal will refund you. It’s a fairly quick process, the longest it took me was 10 days. Avoiding the dovetail store however is good advice. It’s often problematic and scalefast, who run it, are very bad at resolving issues. In my opinion, not worth the bother, especially as a steam sale will always be along fairly soon.
Finally! Yes, I finally received my download of the Norfolk Southern N-Line route. Believe it or not, I accomplished this by following instructions: specifically, Train-Sim Steve's instructions for dealing with Dovetail Store problems. Along the way, I tried communicating with Scalefast, a strictly uncommunicative entity with the sole purpose of standing between the Dovetail Store and DTG customers. In other words, equivalent to the proverbial you-know-whats on a boar hog. In my opinion, Dovetail should cease and desist from passing store transactions through this dedicated obstacle. Leaving Scalefast behind, I proceeded to communicate directly with Dovetail, sending them a copy of my PayPal receipt. After a couple of days (c.f. Flander's and Swan's wonderful ditty, On the Slow Train, recently mentioned elsewhere in these forums), the product code became available at the Steam site. This entire Rube Goldberg process is in severe need of, to use a railroading term, streamlining!!!!!
We'll all sleep better now, thanks for keeping us updated and putting up with everyone's unhelpful suggestions.. Also thank you for providing a full address and zip code for me to redirect all my junk snail mail to..