The Windows Store is TRWTF
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Just had a very annoying shopping experience with Microsoft, and since I didn't want to rant at the poor support drones for something that was outside their power I came here instead.
So I got a PC, came with Windows Home, and had to upgrade to Pro. Now, this is a minor issue, but you can apparently get the upgrade for half of what the full license costs at the online store. To get the special price you have to go through Settings > Update & Security > Activation, and click on upgrade. That opens a special window (doesn't open in your default browser, I imagine it's Edge behind it) with the purchase option at half price. At least I didn't see the upgrade option when I was looking at the store. So that in itself is kind of a dick move.
But then I tried to buy it, and damn, I didn't know you could fail at running a store so badly. Let's skip the privacy and security issues around forcing me to link my credit card with my Microsoft account and not letting me just pay anonymously, that's par for the course. As I'm entering the details, the Country option in the billing address is fixed. And obviously, since I'm travelling abroad, it's fixed in the wrong country. I poke at the form a couple times, mess with my account and settings, but it's not having any of it, so I open a chat with Microsoft Support. To their credit, getting a hold of a real person on chat is pretty quick.
The support guy takes a look, and tells me the problem. I can't make purchases from a country other than the one my credit card is from. This virtual store, selling virtual goods, cares where I physically am at to decide if it will accept my card. Everyone else, from Amazon to the drugstore down the street, will accept my card with no issue, but not the Microsoft Store. Because Microsoft cares about my "privacy and security", according to the support guy. Their solution is to instead use PayPal. Which implies Microsoft feels PayPal is more secure than their store.
So I'm busy, I already spent more than the 15 minutes I meant to waste on the store, and go about the rest of my day until just now when I could get the time to give it another shot. I set my information up on PayPal, go to the Upgrade link, select PayPal as my payment option, and naturally it fails again, with the error message just saying "Please contact support" and a fairly long string of random letters and numbers to give to support.
So I call support again, tell the first guy the issue I had and paste the error message in the chat with the code, and I get transferred to billing. There the guy looks at a few things, and apparently the issue is now that my card's currency is ARS, while the store was showing me the price in USD. This despite the fact that the payment processor is PayPal, and that VISA knows how to convert from any currency to ARS just fine. Again, this is something that every other store, online and physical, handles without bothering me about it.
And the most stupid thing in all of this is that the guy tells me that to get the right store, I have to go into my computer's settings and change the Computer's home location to my country. Well, no, the most stupid thing is actually that this finally works. So for whatever reason, the online store is asking my computer where it's from, and if that doesn't match the billing address of the person paying for the software, the operation doesn't go forward. I just can't understand what was going through the mind of whoever came up with such a messed up way of going about things.
The one good thing about this is that I got to pay for the upgrade in my own currency. My country is going through a bit of a crisis right now, and their store was using an old conversion rate from a couple weeks ago that saved me about 20% of the price. I'm calling it the shithole country discount.
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@kian said in The Windows Store is TRWTF:
Their solution is to instead use PayPal. Which implies Microsoft feels PayPal is more secure than their store.
Well, no. It more likely implies they'd like to have PayPal take on the liability for any fraudulent overseas purchases. :P
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@kian said in The Windows Store is TRWTF:
The support guy takes a look, and tells me the problem. I can't make purchases from a country other than the one my credit card is from. This virtual store, selling virtual goods, cares where I physically am at to decide if it will accept my card.
Ugh. Yeah. I ran into this issue a couple of times. The bestest variation is living in one country but receiving salary in a different one. Besides general hilarity with billing addresses, there's a bunch of stores that will essentially refuse to sell you any of their virtual goods, because ... raisins.
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@cvi clearly we need a next generation payment network to solve this.
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@boomzilla Yeah. Then I can't buy anything anywhere, so at least I know what to expect.
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@cvi said in The Windows Store is TRWTF:
@boomzilla Yeah. Then I can't buy anything anywhere, so at least I know what to expect.
You can buy stuff. Well, imaginary stuff. And the payment system will be stuck in an infinite loop verifying imaginary things.
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@dcon said in The Windows Store is TRWTF:
You can buy stuff. Well, imaginary stuff.
Guess that saves on shipping and generally avoids the hassle of receiving stuff (like having to stay at home for delivery, or getting to a service point and carrying the bloody thing home).
Filed under: Positive thinking!
