Problem with Sony Bookstore payments

[ecbritz]

The www.esupport.sony.com website provides chat support to Sony Reader and Sony Bookstore customers. I was told there that the Bookstore will only accept credit cards registered in the USA. This sounds unlikely to me because Visa, Mastercard etc are internationally accepted cards that will either pay an account or refuse payment on the spot, regardless of the country in which it was registered. With a Mastercard from say, Australia, you can buy anything in say, Brazil, if there is enough money available in the account. Does someone know whether the limitation imposed by Sony -- according to the esupport.sony.com site -- is true? I'd like to test it by entering my non-American credit card details into my Sony Bookstore account. But there is a risk that going against Sony rules (if this rule really applies) might cause a signal sent to my bank, freezing my credit card account temporarily. Does someone perhaps buy from the Sony Bookstore without using a credit card registered in the USA?

[neilmarr]

Good to have your company, Ecbritz. Unfortunately, you're hitting a problem that many of us outside the US have with Sony and several other US-based online bookstores. Claiming geographical restrictions on books, they refuse to deal with 'foreigners'. It's nothing to do with the validity of your credit card. You can jump through hoops to get around this or simply do what most of us do ... find an alternative source of reading material. There's no shortage. Best wishes. Neil

[nomesque]

Your credit card won't be frozen - but yes, you will have problems. The main issue is that (I don't know why) someone, somewhere decided that the point of sale for an ebook is the buyer's computer. Therefore, author's geographic restrictions that you wouldn't ever have really noticed (because if it wasn't available in Australia, well, you could go to Amazon and pay for international shipping) are smacking people in the face left right and centre.

If you are in Australia, you might want to check out borders.com.au, smashwords.com, feedbooks.com and, of course, Neil's Bewrite publishers site.

[bevdeforges]

For what it's worth, the Sony store is far from the only online store that won't take "non-US credit cards" - though there are different definitions of what constitutes a "US credit card."

So far, I think Sony is going by the billing address for the card. I have a perfectly good US based card from a major US bank, but Sony (among other merchants) won't accept it online because my billing address is here in France. (I think I have a way around that - actually kind of stupid, because I now get my credit card bill online, so it doesn't really matter where they mail the actual bill to!)

I've been using gift cards bought through a friend in the US, but just after the Big 5 switchover at the beginning of April, the first gift card I used, the site asked me for my "home address." (Gave my friend's address, of course...)

But I've had other online stores refuse to accept my US based credit card because my billing address is non-US. Williams-Sonoma, for one, even though I was ordering something to be delivered to a US address (wedding present). They did allow me to call (internationally) to validate the credit card.

[Worldwalker]

In the case of Williams-Sonoma, it may have been because an enormous amount of credit card fraud involves international use of stolen credit cards. Numbers stolen in the US are used in Europe and vise versa, usually to buy items which can be resold. Obviously this doesn't apply to ebooks, but it does to wedding presents.

Geographical restrictions on ebooks are just another vestige of publishers' unwillingness to step into the 21st century.