Sunday, June 21, 2009

The internet is not just USA

The internet once got invented in USA so it started there a lot. But it didn't take too long to spread the world. Today, the internet is the place where international businesses meet and do business together. Globalisation is common. However there are some industries which have completely forgot that.

In my case I was looking for an easy way to process credit cards. I knew the "local guys" who do that do it in a very secure and highly professional way. But they are also very expensive and timeconsuming to get there. So I looked around and found a few who offered a small iPhone App as a credit card terminal. Sounded good for the rare small amount charges I had in mind. The iPhone App was sold or given world wide in the AppStore. But then you need some account with a processor. If you try to sign up there, you get stuck. You cant enter your country (missing field), you must enter a US state. The phone number field didnt accept numbers starting with a +. So I tried entering it "us-centric" in the way an american would dial my number.

Here's what I got:


What can I say, that processor didn't get my busines.
I'm still not amused how many american companies are running around in the internet thinking they could only do valuable business with americans. But they will loose at the end.


1 comment:

Andreas Fink said...

that app requires a credit card processor. Paypal is one of them but we can't use them as its not secure enough for our business (they screwed me up once so never again).

Second one seems CyberSource. At least they accept international phone numbers but seem to require a Merchant account which we don't have yet. We start from ground zero.

The frontend doesn't seem to be the issue.