Renewal doubts on Norton 360

[Charth]

Realized my N360, 3 user product needed renewal this past Wednesday. I figured I'd check out how much Norton wanted for renewal before I went to Staples and saved some money by buying a new copy for half price. So I clicked Renew and discovered to my great surprise that online on that day they were offering the renewal for $19.95 plus State Tax. I looked the offer over up, down, left and right and could not see anything wrong with it, so I went for it. My N360 is now renewed for another year. Today I was at a client's house and on discovering his N360 had 8-days left, I said let's go online and try your luck. They now want the $69.95 I expected to be offered the other day.

[Fox28]

I've seen one message from a user saying that he had seen this sort of price on line at Norton, gone to check if it was correct and not a scam and could not get back to it again. If it's OK with you I'll post what you say in the Norton Staff section and see if I get any comments from them. Was this a 3PC renew or a 1 PC renew? Might be worth checking you’re my Norton Account if you had a 3PC version originally. They are getting a lot of criticism on their prices being so high compared with retail specials from people who don't understand that manufacturer cannot consistently undercut the authorized distributors and expect to keep them!

[Huron]

The final makes me think of Norton applying an upgrade rebate of $20 - 30 that sometimes comes up via a coupon but is available to anyone who has any other Norton product; not just the one you may want to buy. So that you could buy GHOST at the upgrades price even if you did not have an earlier version if you had say Norton 360 already. We've queried about how that is done since it does not show up on any of the Norton eStore pages and the answer seemed to be that if you go through the Upgrade route on the website rather than the purchase route you will at some point asked to enter some code that shows you have another Norton product and then the upgrade rebate comes off the invoice.

[OverTaker]

I'll do that tomorrow and let you know what the reaction is if any. Sometimes the tech staff on the forums are understandably reluctant to get involved in commercial matters. So you just went in to the normal Renew page for the expiring product? Did you get any request for existing product information? I have never actually done an online renew. It's always been cheaper to buy and in any case I think Norton didn't have a website back then just here on CIS as was. I hope that it will help you out of the same.

[Dwayne Johnson]

The product is installed on the XP OS on my older triple boot "work" system. These days I almost never boot there (as I usually am working on at least one XP system at one of my shop work-stations and so can refer to that if someone phones me with an XP related question). In any event that's why it got down to just 8-days left before I realized it was almost expired. I just clicked on the renew button on the bottom of the N360 window next to where it says the number of days left and indicated I wanted to go online and renew the product (just to find out the price which as I noted I expected to be 69.95 which IMO is too much for a renewal.

[Philibert]

Recall that I was actively doing Norton AntiVirus support here on CompuServe many years ago when their product came with free updates for the life of the product which was several years. When they did start charging a yearly renewal fee, they took a lot of flack but the fact the fee was only something like $3.95 for an additional year did temper user unhappiness at the renewal fee. Well, over the next few years it went to $9.95 a year and few years later maybe $14.95, and then a few years later $19.95 and in recent years it all of a sudden jumped to $10 less than the list price for the new product.