Packt Avis 179

I'm reading books on Kindle, and so far Packtpub has the best editing. Amazon and other competitors barely convert their PDFs to epub, which has a poor rendered result in most cases.

The subjects are good and the content is very nice. Albeit with a little bit more depth and less work-centered subjects i'd be even happier.

UPDATE: Toby Knight of Packt Customer Relations contacted me, explained what happened, apologized for their initial customer service response, and has issued a full refund. He was very understanding, thorough in his response, and even offered a year's free subscription.

It's unfortunate it required going to TrustPilot to escalate the issue. But very glad Toby saw this, and was able to help.

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I purchased a Mapt/Packt subscription last year - decent material which I used for a bit before needing to cancel. I'd completely forgot about it - and after checking my credit card statement a couple months later, noticed I was still getting charged. Initially, I thought I'd screwed up and never canceled - but upon going to the site, could confirm I had no active subscription. I checked the billing history, and it just states no active subscriptions.

I emailed support & they claim that yes I canceled - and yes I haven't had access for months, but some "Future recurring payment" gets setup when you subscribe. Cancelling the subscription only cancels your access and not the payments - which you will have to manually disable in a 3rd party site. Furthermore, there is no indication on Packt that you are still being billed. Their support team is refusing to consider a refund - which is now sizable amount after the few months of continued billing.

Just another fun fact - the FAQ actually quotes in the how-to-cancel section: "just click 'Pause' and you will not be billed further"... The email response from customer service acknowledges I paused, then goes onto admit I was billed further - but not their fault.

Do yourself a solid and avoid them.

Packt doesn't even deserve a star in review. It's the worst online purchase experience I ever had. I bought 4 ebooks on 20 July 2019, and until now(24 july) I still get nothing at all. I feel cheated. The customer service sucks, they took a long time to get back to me. How I wish I read the reviews before I bought the books.
Really furious about their service.

I love their books and their subscription model, I have been a customer for about 2 years yet in the past month I noticed an issue on their platform where I can no longer access the full library, even after I did pay for it. Contacted customer support, received an answer asking for additional details which I provided, yet here I am, with an annual subscription and no access to the library. The main issue is a technical one, merely one regarding logged in accounts. They have detected my subscription as active and the payments yet for some reason I do not have access... It worked fine back in May, don't know what's happening. I do hope they will fix their issues, I still love their philosophy and I appreciate their dedication to making learning popular, especially their DRM policy.

Bought 2 e-books 4 days ago and there are still missing from my account.

Wrote to customer service and was told to wait 24 hours for the e-books to be available in my account (it was already over 24 hours when customer service replied). Wrote back to customer service and has not heard back from them.

I expected an e-book to be immediately available after purchase (as stated on their website). But I have waited 4 days and I still can't view my e-books and customer service is just plain inefficient.

In short, don't buy your e-books from this website.

Update: Toby from Packt has helped me resolve the issue and I can now view the e-books under my account. It's good to know that Packt does indeed look into their customers' feedback.

Unfortunately their subscription service implementation has real issues (which is ironic considering their business) and their customer relations/service department is incompetent or indifferent. The quality of Packt books varies considerably: some are excellent; many are poor. If you subscribe to their service and run into problems, do *not* assume that the customer service department will resolve the issue. I let things drag on for months (with no access) before I finally deauthorized payment.

Update: After much back-and-forth, Packt did finally address the issue and compensate me appropriately for the past lack of service.

Good value for money. There was an issue with subscription service which took a while to resolve but it has been resolved and I was given some extra credits. Communication is a bit slower but relevant. I definitely continue subscribing.

Such a waste of money. I purchased some books previously, now if i click on the product of the book, the page does not exist!

I purchased an ebook from Packt at 9:18am on 3/7/19 then spent the next hour and a half trying unsuccessfully to transfer the purchase to Kindle. (Packt includes instructions to do so but the guidelines for how to do so when the transfer exceeds 30MBs do not address the issue.)

I requested a refund at 10:47am so that I could purchase it from Amazon instead (for Kindle functionality).

Packt customer service reply:

"We apologize as you are unable to send the title you recently purchased to kindle. As per the company policy (link below) it is possible for us to cancel and refund an order only if you contact us within one hour of placing the order...."

Following this customer service experience, I recommend anyone using Kindle purchase titles directly from Amazon and avoid Packt.

PAC-19-29437101-3349317

Bunch of goats running a business

Hi,
Hi guys I have purchased the monthly subscription inr 400 and one ebook inr 299, next day morning they have charged 14.96 pounds on my account without my knowledge. Even though later I blocked my card, because there is no option given by them to delete the card. I contacted them but till now no reply, I believe these guys would be truthful and reliable but they are not.

Very low standards in their publications. Books are riddled with errors.

[No way to leave reviews or view what others think of the book beforehand, for obvious reasons.]
As it turns out, I was wrong about this and was looking at recent products for which reviews hadn't come in yet. I stand by my point on how poor the standards are. Sure there are procedures for reporting errors, but the quantity of errors I've seen in books suggests the books never had a single going over before publication and the customers are expected to error-check.

I purchased a subscription with Packt and had a problem with content locking, fortunately I contacted support and the technical team fixed the bug causing the issue.
Thank you.

I subscribed last week and had been watching some really good videos, I like the idea and they seem to have some great material. As of yesterday, I can no longer access books or videos and have contacted their support team numerous times - with absolutely no response. So at this point I've paid for a year's worth of service for something I cannot access. At this point, I'm more than disappointed I signed up.

I don't know how to send my email privately? I did receive a reply from customer service on 12/19, that essentially said they have no idea what the problem is but will let me know when it's fixed. Even more disappointed at this point.

Still no resolution as of 12/20, and they can't give me answer as to when it may be fixed, and no offer of extending my subscription. Downgrading the review to one star.

Not trustworthy - Underpaying Authors, they enter agreement with rosy picture, but pay very paltry amount in end citing legal jargon

Avoid them like a disease. I have purchased a subscription to their service Mapt. I am based in the UK and in their user profile page there is a field to enter your company name, so when I downloaded the invoice I expected to be a regular invoice with my company name and VAT. Nothing of that was present. My company name was missing and the invoice was not a regular EU invoice. Instead of VAT there was TAX like in a US invoice.
I contacted them to amend the invoice, initially they offered me help and then after sending me some pointless email asking me to confirm (again) that I wanted an amended invoice they have stopped all communications. They do no reply anymore.
I have tried to exercise my right of cancelling the order within 10 days as by law in all EU is for online purchases and they have ignored my request so far.
This is pure scam. Avoid them!

For the Packt employee who replied to my review, my case number is 324685.

[EDIT 11/04/2018]
I have been refunded at the end. Unfortunately, that doesn't change my opinion of this company nor improves the experience I have had. You have just done what you had to do.
You lack transparency and all this could have been avoided just re-emitting the invoice with the requested amends. All stuff that should have been present from the first version.
What is the point of showing a "Company name" field in your user profile page if there is no obvious use for it?
All this smells a lot.

The website can be a bit clunky and some of the material out of date, but overall I am in awe of the huge range of courses available at a bargain price. Sometimes I see the same books on Amazon at 3 or 4 times the cost of the monthly subscription I pay for access to the whole library!

I signed up to Packtpub this year with a packtlib subscription. I got a very good deal, but what I really wanted was DRM Free ebook library access.

They provided me with exactly that and although the search features are one of the things that let them down a little, it's easily returned on investment already with a great variety of interesting books, one token per-month to access books and other content. Free video tutorial content from experts.

The service matured into something called Mapt, and they contacted me to make me an offer I couldn't refuse so I've now got 3 years access. If they can fix the search to my satisfaction, I'll be a customer for many more years.