The frustration of trying to buy something legally

I have spent many hours in the past 24 hours trying to figure out a way to buy some stuff from the Amazon MP3 store. But I can’t. And I’m angry and frustrated and I now have a much better understanding of why people download music etc. illegally — there are just SO many barriers to doing it legally.

So why can’t I purchase MP3s from the 20 million songs in the Amazon MP3 store? Because I don’t live in the US, because my IP address is not from the US, because I don’t have a US debit or credit card, because Amazon doesn’t take PayPal, because even if I go through a (legal) US VPN Amazon still knows that I’m Australian when I log in (even though one of my registered addresses with Amazon is in the US), and because PayPal doesn’t offer their own branded credit or debit cards to non-US residents. Oh yes, I’ve been through it all trying to figure out how I can buy music (and please don’t tell me to use iTunes…).

I’ve searched online forums who tell me to get a PayPal debit/credit MasterCard and then I can buy from Amazon with that as it’s registered in the US. But non-US/Canadian residents CAN’T get one of these cards.

I’ve looked at those sites that offer to buy on your behalf with their US credit card and address and ship to Australia — but they don’t deal with digital goods, only ‘real’ products like shoes and electronics.

I searched for how to get a US credit or debit card and address, and there are ways to do it by paying a big fee and setting up as a business entity (‘cos obviously I don’t have a Social Security number), or by going to the US with huge amounts of documentation and hoping and praying that some bank will give me a credit card — no guarantees on that. I have relatives and friends in the US so getting a US address shouldn’t be a problem. And I’m heading back to the US for a very short and very packed trip in March, but I want to buy this thing NOW, not in six months time when I *might* have a US debit/credit card, assuming I even try to get one when I’m there.

But the reality is that all I want to do is buy a specific thing from the Amazon MP3 store. It’s a digital download, so shipping isn’t an issue. But where I live and where I bank is an issue.

And with Amazon not accepting PayPal payments, I’m stymied, even if I set up a new account with Amazon that only has a US address attached and if I access it via the US VPN I have access to. I still can’t pay without a US-based debit/credit card, and if I try to access the MP3 store from that account on my own computer, I get a message that it’s only available to US customers.

I’m very frustrated. And angry that I’m trying to buy something legally, but I can’t — all based on where I live. I don’t think that this is all Amazon’s or PayPal’s fault — it is likely they are just the frontline of the faceless people behind the US banking laws and the massive media conglomerates who want to control who buys what and from where. It’s a global world, people — get over it, otherwise honest schmucks like me will be forced to get what we want illegally (no, I don’t want it that much… what I wanted to do was see how hard it was to get, and it’s BLOODY hard. Impossible, in fact.)

BTW, Amazon let me set up a Cloud Player storage place for the MP3s it won’t let me buy! Thanks guys — really appreciate it…

Update: iinet (my ISP) has walked out of piracy talks, stating:

“The rights holders are still insisting ISP’s should perform work on their behalf instead of addressing what we have always said is the root cause of the infringements – the limited accessibility to desirable content and the discriminatory and high cost of content in Australia. Infringements are a symptom – access is the problem.”

I couldn’t agree more! Limited access, discrimination based on geography, and high cost result in ordinary people downloading illegally who would likely pay for content if it was available to all and at a fair price.

Update 16 January 2013: I don’t know who ‘Scott’ is but he sent me a $5 Amazon gift card in the hope that it would solve my problem. In his note to me he said:

I heard you had some problems with Amazon mp3s. … next time this comes up, you’ll have a few bucks in your account. Consider it a newsletter donation. BTW- If this works, it may be a solution to your problem. You can contact your U.S. friends, send them some PayPal money, and then they can send you an Amazon gift card.

Thank you, Scott! However, the gift card approach didn’t work either. When I tried to apply it to an MP3 purchase, I got as far as the ‘Review’ page, clicked ‘Continue’ then got this message:

We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently only available to US customers. Please refer to the terms of use of the MP3 store to determine the geographical restrictions.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

I tried again via the US VPN access I have, but got the same message. There is just no legal way I can purchase something from the Amazon MP3 store if I live outside the US.

Thanks again, Scott. At least I’ll have $5 to apply to my next book purchase from Amazon.

Next, I went back to Amazon to check out their MP3 terms and conditions and geographic restrictions, as stated in their message. Well, finding the terms and conditions was hard enough, but finding anything about geographic restrictions was even harder — it was tucked away at the end of section 2.2. From Amazon’s MP3 Store Terms of Use (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_cn?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200154280):

Section 2.2: …. As required by our Music Content providers, Music Content is available only to customers located in the United States.

So, as I suspected, this restriction is imposed by Amazon on behalf of the traditional music recording industry who are so desperately trying to protect themselves from going under.They’d have a better chance of stopping piracy if they didn’t impose such ridiculous geographic restrictions on people who legitimately want to buy music!

Interestingly, the Terms don’t specify what they mean by ‘located in the United States’. As I mentioned earlier, I have a physical US address of a family member attached to my Amazon account as well as my Australian one. That US address is listed as my primary address with Amazon. However, the two credit cards linked to my Amazon account are both Australian, with my Australian address attached to them. Amazon isn’t going on IP address either to determine my location as I have the same issue when I go through the US VPN. So even though I was trying to purchase with a gift card that originated from someone in the US, and even though my primary address on Amazon is a US address, and even though I was going through a US VPN, Amazon still didn’t consider me as ‘located in the US’. Therefore, it must be using my credit card information to determine that I’m in Australia.

What’s going on in India?

I haven’t applied for a Visa for another country in years (Australians typically go into the US under the Visa Waiver scheme, and my recent trip to Bali involved purchasing a 30-day Indonesian Visa at Denpasar Airport after I landed in Bali), so maybe the Sex option on the form below is now common for all countries, not just India.

One of my clients sent the link to the online application form to me — he travels a lot and to lots of out-of-the-way countries in deepest darkest Africa etc., but even he said that he’s never seen an option like this on a Visa application form.

Awww… Cute 404 message

Our State’s Department of Environment and Conservation has recently updated its website, so all it’s arcane URLs (you know, the ones with heaps of numbers and gobbledygook in them that made no sense at all — see under the Search box n the image below for the original URL) have gone and been replaced with readable and understandable URLs (yay!). So when I went in via a bookmarked URL, I got a 404 message.

It was too cute not to share ;-) (though it would’ve been better had they done some sort of redirect instead of me having to hunt out the page again — it’s not the page had been revamped so dramatically that it was radically different; it just had a readable URL now).

It’s still a cute 404 message.

Ticket lunacy!

I was in Sydney last week for the ASTC(NSW) annual conference. After the conference was all over, our good friend Dave (from the US) and Hamish (a friend from Queensland) and my husband and I decided to go to Luna Park (an old-style amusement park) in Sydney. None of us had ever been before and there was a good chance we may never get the opportunity or have the desire to go again.

Both Dave and I independently investigated ticket prices on our smartphones and I noticed that there was a two-for-one deal after 6 pm each day (the Lunacy ticket). That suited us fine as the conference didn’t finish until 5 pm and Luna Park was on the other side of Sydney Harbour Bridge, a decent taxi ride from the conference hotel. It was unlikely we’d get there before 6 pm anyway, and a two-for-one deal is not to be sneezed at when the usual prices are well over $40 each.

What we didn’t notice, as it was almost hidden on the website (especially when viewed on a smartphone — the Luna Park website is NOT optimized for mobile and doesn’t have a mobile option), was that Lunacy tickets could only be purchased online. We found that out later…

Off we went in a taxi, on to the freeways and over the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. Luna Park hugs the edge of the harbour just below the Bridge at Milsons Point. After marveling at the view of the Bridge, the Opera House, a P&O liner being pulled away from Circular Quay, and after waiting for several wedding parties to enter the wide open mouth of the Luna Park entrance (dressed up with a moustache especially for Movember), we made our way through those imposing teeth and joined the snaking line for tickets. Some 20 minutes or so later we were at the beginning of the line.

And there we encountered total LUNACY! When we asked the girl at the ticket counter for the two-for-one Lunacy ticket deal, she told us that this deal was only available online not from the ticket counter. However, she told us that if we had smartphones, we could go on to the website and buy the tickets, then come back to the counter to show the barcodes in the PDFs that would be emailed to us after we’d purchased the tickets online. How stupid is that? We were there, right then! She did say we could step off to the side to do the transaction and wouldn’t have to go to the end of the line again — a small consolation.

I tried to buy tickets on my phone, but got an error message about already having tabs open and not allowing me to go further to purchase the tickets. Hamish tried on his phone too and got the same message as me. Then Dave tried on his phone. He was able to get a little further, then, with his thumbs he had to enter HEAPS of information (name, full address [at least the website accepted his US address], phone number, credit card details, etc. etc. I even think he had to enter his date of birth!). Did I mention that the website was NOT suitable for mobile access? Watching him enter all this information was a painful experience, and it took about 15 minutes of zooming, scrolling (horizontal and vertical), and entering data. When he was finally done, he clicked Submit and got a message that he already had a window open! However, after clicking OK on that message, his transaction went through (we hoped). We got him to buy tickets for us all in that one transaction and paid him back in cash — there was no point in buying separate tickets, even had Hamish and I been able to use our phones.

After another couple of minutes, the confirmation email came back to Dave (yes, it had traveled from Australia near where we were standing to the US and back again — crazy!). We got back in line and Dave showed the ticket counter girl the confirmation number. But still that wasn’t enough. She needed the barcode number in the PDF attached to the email! Actually, she needed TWO barcode numbers — Dave had bought two Lunacy tickets in the ONE transaction, but the email had TWO PDFs with TWO different barcodes, and the ticket girl needed BOTH. So he opened the PDF attachment on his phone and had to zoom in to show the barcode number to the girl who wrote it down on a Post-It note and then typed it into her system. Repeat for the next set of tickets…

Did I mention that these Lunacy tickets were perfectly named? What sort of CRAZY system is this? It is SO inefficient, incredibly frustrating for the customer (and must be equally frustrating for the ticket counter staff), and is exacerbated by a website that is very difficult to use on a small device. I wonder how many people don’t persevere and just pay the full price ($44.95 per adult) at the ticket counter? This whole exercise took us between 30 and 40 minutes — just to buy two sets of tickets. Madness.

How could Luna Park make this a friendlier process? Well, here are some suggestions…

• Allow two-for-one tickets to be purchased at the ticket counter. How difficult would that be? Already there are LOTS of ticket options at the counter — adding another option should not be difficult; it would just be another point-of-sale option. Making people stand aside and go onto their smartphones to purchase, then wait for an email and open a PDF attachment all so that the person behind the counter can write down the number on a piece of paper and then enter it is just incredibly inefficient. And stupid.

If Luna Park decides to NOT allow these tickets to be purchased at the counter, then consider the following changes to make the process more user friendly.

• Make it more obvious that Lunacy tickets are ONLY available online. This should be noted in the summary of the ticket types (see top image) as well as be more prominent at the place where you decide which tickets you want (see image below where I’ve circled in red the times they use ‘online’ in the text).

• Redesign the website and the purchase process in particular so that it detects a mobile device and displays correctly and easily on that device. Continual horizontal and vertical scrolling and zooming in and out to try to find the next field is frustrating and time-consuming. And of course, the Tab key is non-existent on many smartphone keyboards so moving between fields is not easy when they are not optimized for mobile use.
• Check the online purchase form and delete any fields that are NOT necessary for the purchase of tickets.
• Allow the confirmation number to be used as the identifier, or put the barcode numbers into the text of the email. Still keep the PDF for printing out for those who need a receipt. But put the relevant information up front and not hidden in a PDF that has to be opened and scrolled.
• If a customer buys TWO or more Lunacy tickets (i.e. for four or more people), ONE barcode should be sufficient as confirmation. Why produce multiple PDFs?

I wonder how many people walk away from purchasing tickets as a result of the awkward and frustrating ticket purchasing current process and ineffectual website and form design? We can’t be the only ones who found this whole process unbelievable.

BTW, the girl at the ticket counter was great and explained that we could use our smartphones to buy online there and then and could enter the line at the front once we’d done that. She was very professional about it all, so I expect she’s had to deal with this situation often. How frustrating for her too!

And we had a good time at Luna Park. I think we’ll all tick it off our bucket lists (even if it wasn’t on our respective lists). It was a bit like stepping back in time. I’m not a big fan of amusement parks, so I doubt I’ll ever go again. But it was fun for my first and last time. Except for the crazy ticketing process.

[Links last checked November 2012]

Trust is an issue

I read about a handy little app in a computer magazine the other day. So I went to the website, where I watched a video of what it does.

I wanted to find out more about the company behind it, so I went to the About section (which told me NOTHING about the history of the company or the people behind it) and then I went to the Contact section expecting to see a street or postal address at least, perhaps a map, definitely one or more phone numbers for sales, support etc. All these things are the ‘trust’ cues I use to decide whether or not the company is legitimate and whether I can trust them with my details and my money.

But I got nothing except misspelled link text (highlighted in yellow in the screen shot below) and links that only went to generic email addresses. I decided not to download/buy this app as the lack of ‘trust’ cues meant that I felt uneasy about trusting them with my information.

If they’re a 15-year-old operating out of the family basement — and if they tell me that (i.e. give me the backstory) — then I’d be more likely to trust them than giving me nothing on their About/Contact pages.

How about you? Do you check out a company’s About/Contact page before trusting them with your details/money?

The saga of this blog’s PayPal ‘Donate’ button

The last day of 2011 started innocently enough. It was a weekend, and one of the last days of my Christmas/New Year break. I was pretty relaxed…

Then I got an email from PayPal with We’ve limited your PayPal account in the subject line.

(My highlights: I can’t send or withdraw funds, so in effect they’ve frozen my account, though I can continue to receive payments; they *may* remove this limitation — then again, they may not!; no, my PayPal account is a validated business/merchant account, NOT a registered charity or non-profit — that statement is just plain wrong!)

I glanced through the email quickly, then went directly to the PayPal website from within my browser (I didn’t click the links in the email in case it was some sort of phishing scam).

Once I’d logged in to PayPal, the first page had this:

So I clicked the Update Now button and got taken to the Resolution Centre page, which had this (my highlights to show what I *can’t* do with my PayPal account):

I got angry — this is MY money, and now I can’t touch it!

I went searching on Google for other instances of PayPal limiting people’s accounts and mostly found stuff about dispute resolutions over eBay payments, non-delivery of goods etc. Nothing seemed to fit my situation. So I decided to contact PayPal by phone — they are open for phone contact every day of the week except Sunday, and as this was a Saturday, I gave it a try.

I spoke to Tim in Arizona. He knew straight away what I was calling about and said it was because I’d started using a PayPal Donate button on my website (this blog) recently and that I needed to be a registered charity to do that. What the…? I couldn’t recall a single thing on the PayPal web page where you create buttons where it said you could only use the Donate button if you were a registered charity. However, I did recall a pre-Christmas incident that went viral on the internet about some stuff Regretsy.com did.

Tim agreed that the purposes for which I was using the ‘Donate’ button seemed fine (I use these small donations to pay annual WordPress fees to keep this blog free of ads, use my own CSS etc.) and he said that would’ve been what he would’ve chosen under the same circumstances. However, he said that PayPal wouldn’t lift the freeze until I’d submitted the documentation requested (things such as my Australian Business Number, Certificate of Registration for my business, letterhead giving me authority to act on behalf of my company, and two pages of information about my purposes for using the button, my expected transactions [in dollars] per month, and my company’s mission statement).

Tim also suggested that I use a different sort of button on this blog — still select  the ‘Donations’ category, but instead use my own image. I tried that, but WordPress.com blogs won’t accept FORM code and there was no email code I could use like that of the previous ‘Donate’ button.

I was also to remove the existing PayPal ‘Donate’ button from all blog posts that had it — some 68 of them (how do I know? ‘cos I spent about two hours replacing them with the old e-junkie code I’ve used for much of the life of this blog).

Update:

Five hours after receiving the email from PayPal, one phone call later, documentation filled in, scanned, and uploaded to PayPal, and 68 blog post updates later, I get a phone call from Dee at PayPal in the US to tell me that my use of the ‘Donate’ button is acceptable based on the documentation I’ve sent in, and that my PayPal account would be unfrozen in minutes. She also said she’d send a confirmation email and that I could continue using this button and that that was it as far as PayPal was concerned.

Note: Nowhere in this email does it explicitly state that I can continue using this button. I only have the account reinstatement and Dee’s word in a phone conversation that I can.

So, with that, I’ll start using the PayPal ‘Donate’ button again. But this was five hours of worry and panic and phone calls and updating blog posts I could have lived without on a holiday Saturday. Plus another couple of hours changing those 68 blog posts back.

BTW, after all this, I went back into PayPal to the ‘create buttons’ area looking for information that restricts the use of the Donate button, and found NOTHING. Here’s the popup for the ‘What button should I use?’ link:

And part of the Regretsy saga documented an email received by them from PayPal, which clearly states there is no right or wrong way to use the Donate button or the circumstances under which it can be used.

If PayPal does have restrictions on the use of some of their buttons, then they should make that absolutely clear on their website, in the place where people are going to create these buttons. There’s NOTHING there.

Update 2 January 2012: In today’s email I received a request from PayPal to complete a survey about the limitation process. So I did, and had my 2 cents’ worth to say in the only Comment field they offered. I wonder if anything will come of that.

Update 23 January 2012: Today I get ANOTHER email from PayPal limiting my account and telling me I have to submit doco again! This time I called the Australian support centre straight away (1800 073 263) and spoke to a nice man in the US (Chris) who looked my history over and said that the limitation would be lifted within 24 to 36 hours, and no, he didn’t know why I was limited again. Unbelievable.

Update 24 January 2012: Some 28+ hours after limiting my account and me making the phone call, the limitation was lifted.

See also:

• http://netprofitstoday.com/blog/thinking-about-using-that-paypal-donate-button-to-your-blog/

[Links last checked December 2011]

Amazon: Synonym for ‘confusing’

Amazon have a ‘Big Deal’ sale on Kindle books until December 23, 2011. So I clicked the link for the Amazon store, and saw that a book I’d read through my local public library was on sale for $1.99 (I’ve used yellow highlighting to show the relevant bits) .

I quite enjoyed the book and thought my Mum might like it (she has a Kindle). So I clicked the book’s cover to find out more and to purchase this book for her. And I got this:

Confusing moment #1: The price is now $14.37 for the Kindle edition! What? The link I clicked had it at $1.99, so why is it now $14.37? It was only December 21 when I clicked the link, so the deal hadn’t expired.

Note: When I clicked the link for the Kindle edition, Amazon was happy to sell it to me for $14.37, not $1.99 as advertised on the Big Deal sale page. Guess what? I didn’t buy it.

Confusing moment #2: Below the title, author and star rating is a statement that pricing information isn’t available. Yet there’s pricing listed for three different editions and three different sources.

So I looked closer at the page to see what was going on, and spotted this:

Confusing moment #3: Amazon obviously knows I’m from Australia, so why did it show this book on the ‘Big Deals’ page in the first place if it won’t sell it to customers from Australia? Why does it show the pricing of the various editions etc. and allows a potential customer to click on those prices, yet shows this message that I can’t purchase this book in ANY edition because I live in Australia up in the top right corner of the page where I won’t see it? And why can’t I buy a book just because I live in Australia? It’s a Kindle book, NOT a printed and bound book, so the publishers’ agreements should have already been sorted for international distribution by electronic means. It’s unlikely I could buy this book in a bookstore as bookstores don’t sell Kindle books, only Amazon does! I’m getting confused…

Then add to this mix this gem from the official review:

Confusing moment #4: Disher is an Australian author. He’s won Australian awards. I’m an Australian living in Australia. I have an internet connection and an Amazon account. I can go to the Amazon site and buy books, as I have done for many years.  But I CAN’T buy THIS book because I live in Australia!

There’s something very wrong about that.

But equally, there’s something very wrong with the Amazon site too. Not only is it confusing regarding pricing, but if Amazon already knows I’m from Australia and thus knows that it can’t sell me that book, then why doesn’t it put that information on the book’s main page in a popup message or similar, right in the middle of the browser window where I can see it? Why hide the information in a little box in the top right corner of the window?

This is not the sort of user experience that would encourage a potential customer to buy from Amazon.

I’m pretty savvy around websites; my 80-year old Mum isn’t. She buys Kindle books, so this sort of experience would be very confusing for her. Hell, it was confusing enough for me!

Cool map of LinkedIn connections

My friend Suzy alerted me to this cool LinkedIn ‘map app’ that you can get at LinkedIn Labs.

Here’s a zoomed out version of my LinkedIn connections:

My mapped connections on LinkedIn

From what I can decipher, my (mostly) Australian connections are on the right, with my international (mostly US) connections on the left.

The large blue and green blobs on the left seem to be my technical communication colleages; on the right, the three outer blobs are people I know us working at the same company, as is the little blue blob on the right.

Notice how there’s a lot of connectivity between connections in each of the main groups.

Pretty cool.

[Links last checked December 2011]

See all fonts on your computer at once

From Chuck Green’s Ideabook (http://www.ideabook.com) newsletter came this:

Wordmark is wonderful online tool that allows you to see words and phrases in all of the typefaces loaded on your computer. So, for example, I can type in “ideabook” and see it rendered in all of the hundreds of the typefaces on my system — every family and every typeface within them.

You can see Wordmark in action here: http://www.wordmark.it/

Type a word in the box at the top, select your settings from the top bar (optional), then click Load Fonts.

Here’s an example of what you get (I left the default ‘wordmark’ as the word to render):

Example fonts on my computer

[Links last checked September 2011]

Suspicious Google search results

I was doing a Google search for an ex-colleague the other day. In the search results I saw this:

That looked suspicious. What on earth were a whole lot of ‘Edwards’ doing listed under flight information? Were they employees? Or was this an passenger list? Or some other list?

Whatever it was, I suspect it wasn’t meant to be public!

Curiosity got the better of me so I went to the linked page. There was nothing on it related to any names at all, let alone a slew of ‘Edwards’. So I checked the source code — nothing in the HTML markup either.

So that got me wondering as to where this list of names had come from. Was it a list previously associated with this page and Google was reporting what was in its cache? Was it a list drawn from a (secure?) database — if so, why weren’t the names showing on the page or in its markup? Were the names employees or a flight manifest? If so, isn’t this a major breach of security?

I still don’t know how those names got there or where they came from, but it made me suspicious of the sort of data that Google might have access to without anyone knowing it — such as staff or passenger lists.

BTW, I didn’t find my ex-colleague…