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Originally Posted by corona
I looked at their form and said "fuhgedaboudit." Lots of blanks, lots of fields marked with asterisks (which we all by now know means "required"), "your billing address must be the same as your shipping address" (huh?), when I just wanted to give them a little bit of money and get my book.
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Name and address. Password. Yes, the billing address has to be the same (there's a checkbox for it) because they're not physically sending you something, they're emailing it, and their credit card company likes it that way. If you've never dealt with one, let me tell you, retailers are at the mercy of CC clearinghouses. Webscriptions requires pretty much the minimum that their processor allows them to get away with -- what they need to know to run your credit card (or what PayPal requires, as the case may be) and no more.
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So, yes, sorry for maligning webscriptions, but they, too, might take a lesson from the fact that customers sometimes just like to walk into the store, buy something, and go home and use it.
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If you walk into a store and hand someone cash, they've got known-good (usually) cash in hand, everything's cool.
If you walk into a store and hand someone a CC, they can check your ID (though it's disturbing how many don't) and be reasonably certain you're the proper owner of that card.
If you buy something online, the retailer doesn't know if you're who you say you are, or some dude from Nigeria who stole a CC number from a victim of his advance-fee scam. They can't see you. They can't look at your ID, or even at your card. So the credit card company wants a name, address, and phone number, which gives them at least
some hope that you're you and not me.
Buying something with a credit card from someone who you're invisible to is never going to be the same as handing someone some legal tender face-to-face. It's a different sort of transaction, and if you ever have a credit card stolen, you'll be thankful that it is. If you don't want an online retailer and their credit card clearinghouse knowing your billing information, you're going to have to stick with handing people legal tender.