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Another big one: expecting local information from international customers. My phone number starts with +49 and is longer than a North American phone number. Th
by nicbou 3y ago
Another big one: expecting local information from international customers.
My phone number starts with +49 and is longer than a North American phone number. This prevents me from renting a Bixi bicycle in Montreal. You know who likes to rent bicycles? Tourists like me.
In any case my card failed with a generic error, both at the payment booth, and in the mobile app (after working one time).
Another one was a stand up paddling booking website. I shouldn’t need a Canadian postal code to rent something (especially 10km from the border) yet here we are. In any case it was impossible to select the field on my phone, so I dropped out. I wonder how much business they lost to this single bug.
This sort of stuff happens when you ask for data that you don’t need, and validate it beyond your needs. I fight tooth and nail with colleagues to reduce the size of forms to avoid this sort of friction and bugs.
EDIT: oh and IBAN discrimination, which is illegal but happens even on government websites
- tommiegannert 3y agoA hotel in Sweden used an external booking system for breakfast slots (remnants of CoVID, I guess). To receive breakfast, I had to provide name, email address and a phone number. And read a ~15 phone-screens ToS. Strangely, no one pointed out the obviously fake email address or phone number when I had the breakfast. Perhaps it wasn't needed after all.
- kwanbix 3y agoAh, the ToS. I sometimes download a game in my Xbox Series X and the TOS is crazy long. What the fck for?
- noirscape 3y agoOh that crap is super common on restaurant wifi too around here. The funny thing is that they can't actually validate the email address so most just accept whatever (sometimes with a small extra filter to avoid stuff like a@a.com).
- red-iron-pine 3y agoIn 8th grade, long ago, my buddy created a hotmail account: deepthroat50005. he thought it was based on Metal Gear Solid's reference to the Watergate thing. Didn't get the other connotations -- at least not at first. He disowned it, and we laughed about it for a while. I still use that email for anything that requires an email but I DGAF about. Hasn't been rejected yet...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tommiegannert 3y agoI always use example.com, since it's reserved for examples, and guaranteed that no one is bothered by it. :)
- kwanbix 3y agoYeah, the same thing happened when I move to Germany, but the other way around. Some app, don't recall which, would not accept my Argentinean phone number. I now want to try Cargaroo or something like that, but I am not willing to give them my CC information and they don't have paypal.
- thatjoeoverthr 3y agoRelated: requiring one specify a US state. I hit this yesterday, with a modern AI SAAS! Once I hit this with zip code validation. Knowing that the credit card processor doesn't actually check this, I found a particular state (Arkansas) that happened to include my Polish postal code. This worked and I paid my bill.
- asdajksah2123 3y ago> This prevents me from renting a Bixi bicycle in Montreal. While I suspect this is a screwup on the part of Bixi, you're making the mistake of confusing bikeshare with bike rental. Don't worry though, you're in good company, including many companies that operate bikeshare. Bikeshare is meant to be a transportation service to get people from point A to point B. More often than not tourists don't use it that way and even when they do, they would be better served using bikes that are not part of the bikeshare system so they're able to go slower than a commuter would and enjoy the sights on the way, as well as stop randomly to checkout something that might look interesting. Tourists are almost always better off renting a bike for a day or even a few hours than using the bikeshare system. Many bikeshare systems would in fact be better served restricting access only to long term members.
- stokesr 3y agoWhile I myself am a long-term user of my local bikeshare network and more often than not see tourists renting private bikes by the day, I have to disagree with the idea of restricting access for short-term users. It's always been super handy for when friends come to visit and we can all take the same method of transportation, and it means they can afford to park further out of town where the free car spaces are and cycle into the city centre.
- CalRobert 3y agoTourists also like to go from point A to point B. I use citibike in NYC when I'm a tourist for this use case.
- nicbou 3y agoBike rental places were driven out of business by Bixi.
- rerx 3y agoI disagree. As a tourist I would usually prefer to use bike share, similarly to the systems I'm used to at home. Getting and returning bikes at dedicated rental shops is quite a hassel, typically much more expensive, and unnecessary if I just want a simple city bike. In fact I suspect that it's often intentional that tourists have a hard times registering for bike share systems. They would greatly impact the business of preexisting bike rental shops.
- freddie_mercury 3y agoI have this problem all the time. I live in Vietnam and my address looks something like 561/34/13 Điện Biên Phủ, Phương 25, Quận Tân Bình, TP. Hồ Chí Minh The ways this usually fails with websites: They tell me a slash isn't allowed, like they know my address better than me. They tell me I need a post code. There are no post codes in Vietnam. They tell me I need a state or province. Hồ Chí Minh City is a city without a province. (There are five such cities that have the same rank as a province and thus aren't contained within one.) They have no concept of phương ("ward") and quận ("district"), without which the rest of my address is anything from ambiguous to useless. They often have a "second address line" where I can put this in but they often have limitations that make it impossible to enter. (Like not allowing commas, or only allowing 15 characters, or not allowing periods, and I don't even remember what all problems I run into the years with it.) And all for what?
- jiehong 3y agoThis reminds me of forms explicitly requesting filling-in your name "exactly as written in your passport", only to directly refuse any non-ascii characters (like any accents).
- afiori 3y agoThey might have meant the spelling at the bottom, the part filled with <<<<<<<<<<< there I believe that only ASCII is used. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#/media/File:ROC_National_Without_Registration_Passport_Datapage.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#/media/File:ROC_Natio...
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoThey probably mean the name as written in the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) name field of the passport. Each issuing country chooses how to transliterate names to match the MRZ encoding as needed. The MRZ allows the characters 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ< and no others. The Visual Inspection Zone (VIZ) CAN contain characters outside this set, though SEVIS recommends including a transliteration into the MRZ character set as well.
- 3y ago
- jiehong 3y agoSadly true in every country. Recently been to China, and now that everything requires WeChat, it's extremely convenient if you're local, but as a tourist things are very difficult when you don't have: - a Chinese phone number; - a WeChat account with payment activated; - a Chinese ID card. Wanna read the menu? Only if you have wechat and an internet connection to scan that QR code (many places have no physical menus). Wanna pay with cash you've just exchanged at the airport? Sorry, nobody uses cash anymore (many shops won't accept cash at all). Wanna book a train ticket online before you reach China to plan your trip? Sorry, you've got to be Chinese for that and have a local number. Wanna pay with your credit card something in a big mall? They might accept it, but their IT system might not always manage to communicate with your bank and it may fail for no reason. Albeit, the opposite problem is true in Germany: many places only accept cash, or only accept EC cards, aka special credit cards issued by German banks only.
- arrowsmith 3y ago> many places have no physical menus I hate this trend so much
- voytec 3y agoMy simplest solution - changing restaurants. I absolutely don't trust the security of mobile devices, won't be scanning unknown QR codes, opening websites with unknown 3rd party spying garbage nor installing spyware-infused apps in order to get a glass of wine.
- Dalewyn 3y agoI can understand why it's happening, at least: * Don't need to purchase paper. * Don't need to purchase or contract a printer. * Can change the menu willy nilly. * It's in line with the current environmentalism fad. But that said: If the restaurant can't be arsed to provide me with requisite-free information on what god damn food they serve, I can't be arsed to provide my god damn money for their time.
- robjan 3y ago
- AmericanChopper 3y agoIt’s worse in a lot of other places around the world. A lot of vendors in Asia won’t accept credit card payments from foreign BIN numbers. Want to buy a train or plane ticket from the local service provider? Too bad. Want to top up a SIM card? Definitely not. A lot of those places also have local payment wallets (like TNG, GoPay, GrabPay…) that are incredibly ubiquitous, and entirely inaccessible without a local bank account. In most of those places it’s the local governments fault rather than the vendors fault specifically, but still incredibly frustrating.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoDutch banks all got together some 15 years ago to devise the perfect online payment system: iDeal. Pretty much everyone uses it. Checkmate PayPal and Visa card. But the best secondary effect was that it locks out foreign banks who can't be arsed to set up a local branch and apply for a banking license.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoExcept that it has absolutely no protection after you've paid. You have no recourse with iDeal. The money has been sent. How often do you read on Dutch forums [1] whether they paid with iDeal? Because if you do, your only recourse is to either sue them (which the Dutch rarely do) or open a dispute with the Thuiswinkel Waarborg [2]. For as long as I bought stuff online in The Netherlands I used a credit card. If they didn't offer it I'd find someone else. [1] https://tweakers.net https://tweakers.net (tweaking as in tinkering, not the other kind) [2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuiswinkel_Waarborg https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuiswinkel_Waarborg