NevDull’s Take On Things

Apple Store Unusable

August 5th, 2006

So… I went to the online Apple Store to buy a gift certificate for Amy to pick up more episodes of her new favorite thing to buy on iTunes, Prison Break.  Got all the way through the checkout process, and told her to check her e-mail.  Nothing.  So I went and looked back at the Order Complete page.  In relatively small, unadorned type, below the ordered items list (which still had the item, but had a total of $0.00 at the bottom), I found:

We were unable to process the iTunes Music Store Gift Certificate portion of your order. Gift certificates require a U.S. billing address. Please save your order for later and provide valid U.S. billing information for your account

OK, it wasn’t completed, but nobody said “HEY, YOUR ORDER DIDN’T COMPLETE, FIX SOMETHING!”

And, of course, since I live in New York City, I live IN THE US.  So… either this was an address verification error by Apple or the credit card company.

I logged back in again, which itself was nutters.  I don’t know why I should have to keep logging in if I’ve never left the Apple Store part of the site.  I went to my account details, and tried a variation on my address.  I live in an apartment, and my address is something like “123 West 4th Street Apt 56″, so there are lots of legit variations on the way to put that, so I’ve tried several.  There was even a place for my credit card’s security code, so I put it in there.  Validated fine for them in the bit about my account.  4 or 5 failures with the same crap about my not living in the US.

And… it said on the page that if I needed to contact someone by phone about my order, to wait a half hour for the order to get into their system.  Where’s the “click here for live help”?

Apple’s value proposition is the “experience”.  Mine sucked.

Entry Filed under: General