Thank you so much for making this post, Mindy. Patreon has literally changed my life and I am so grateful, but it remains incredibly clunky to use (for both creators and patrons). Here are some things I’d love to see corrected:
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Overall site organization/navigation — Here’s a good thread that sums up my feelings on this pretty well. At this point, Patreon is only truly convenient to use if you a) pledge to someone based on existing knowledge of their work and/or their video/page description, and b) don’t want to look at any past content. The combination of pagination and featured tags makes viewing past content so difficult that I hesitate to use “access to full Patron-only post library” as a selling point for new Patrons because of it. I’d suggest looking at blogging platforms for cues on how to manage this better: Some sort of easy summary view of past posts and giving us SIGNIFICANTLY more control over the tagging system would be a great start. I’d literally (not literally) kill a man for a highly customizable home page with drag n’ drop modules that would allow me to showcase albums of images, categories of posts, featured posts, videos, etc.
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Patron Manager/Relationship Manager — Both features are clunky to navigate. I don’t see why the Patron Manager & Relationship Manager couldn’t be combined into a more functional tool that serves both purposes. Afaik, the main difference between the two is that the Relationship Manager includes past Patrons, right? Also, it’s irritating that the “Additional details” private notes don’t show up in the Patron Manager, and aren’t searchable. In order to get anything useful out of this section, I basically need to download the Patron Manager CSV and completely reformat it. OH, and… this is a tiny thing, but can you please put the total number of Patrons in each tier at the top of each tier section in the Patron Manager? It’s so stupid that I have to either navigate to my home page, download the CSV and highlight the cells, or manually count how many Patrons I need to send rewards to in each tier.
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Refunds — This has only been a problem for me once, but it was a BIG problem, and I’m terrified it will happen again: I have my Patreon set up to auto-withdraw my payments to my Paypal each month, so generally there is little to no money sitting on Patreon. When I recently needed to refund two months of $50 pledges, I found that I couldn’t choose to pull that refund money from another payment source (like my Paypal, or even a bank account), but instead had to wait until the next month’s payments went through in order to refund my Patron. When I brought this up with support in hopes that I was missing something obvious, I was told that my best alternative was to privately refund my Patron through a third party payment source, which seems like a recipe for disaster, particularly if you’re processing a refund because of bad blood. I see absolutely no reason why a refund couldn’t be processed using the same payment method as my pledges to other creators if I don’t have enough money on my Patreon account for the expense.
I also want to vehemently second the complaints about the notifications system and the messages system, which are all but useless.
Thank you for asking, and listening, and hopefully for fixing!