[nicbou]

Another big one: expecting local information from international customers.

My phone number starts with +49 and is longer than a North American phone number. This prevents me from renting a Bixi bicycle in Montreal. You know who likes to rent bicycles? Tourists like me.

In any case my card failed with a generic error, both at the payment booth, and in the mobile app (after working one time).

Another one was a stand up paddling booking website. I shouldn’t need a Canadian postal code to rent something (especially 10km from the border) yet here we are. In any case it was impossible to select the field on my phone, so I dropped out. I wonder how much business they lost to this single bug.

This sort of stuff happens when you ask for data that you don’t need, and validate it beyond your needs. I fight tooth and nail with colleagues to reduce the size of forms to avoid this sort of friction and bugs.

EDIT: oh and IBAN discrimination, which is illegal but happens even on government websites

[freddie_mercury]

I have this problem all the time.

I live in Vietnam and my address looks something like

561/34/13 Điện Biên Phủ, Phương 25, Quận Tân Bình, TP. Hồ Chí Minh

The ways this usually fails with websites:

They tell me a slash isn't allowed, like they know my address better than me.

They tell me I need a post code. There are no post codes in Vietnam.

They tell me I need a state or province. Hồ Chí Minh City is a city without a province. (There are five such cities that have the same rank as a province and thus aren't contained within one.)

They have no concept of phương ("ward") and quận ("district"), without which the rest of my address is anything from ambiguous to useless. They often have a "second address line" where I can put this in but they often have limitations that make it impossible to enter. (Like not allowing commas, or only allowing 15 characters, or not allowing periods, and I don't even remember what all problems I run into the years with it.)

And all for what?

[jiehong]

This reminds me of forms explicitly requesting filling-in your name "exactly as written in your passport", only to directly refuse any non-ascii characters (like any accents).

[SAI_Peregrinus]

They probably mean the name as written in the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) name field of the passport. Each issuing country chooses how to transliterate names to match the MRZ encoding as needed. The MRZ allows the characters 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ< and no others. The Visual Inspection Zone (VIZ) CAN contain characters outside this set, though SEVIS recommends including a transliteration into the MRZ character set as well.

[afiori]

They might have meant the spelling at the bottom, the part filled with <<<<<<<<<<< there I believe that only ASCII is used.

eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#/media/File:ROC_Natio...

[Saigonautica]

Some cheat codes I use when ordering parts from overseas, in case useful:

I set postal code to 700000 for HCMC (in theory, we have postal codes defined in VN. We just don't use them).

Usually I set province = Hồ Chí Minh City and then am able to select city = Hồ Chí Minh City as well (even though this is incorrect, as you say).

The lack of slashes is still often a show-stopper for me too, as is insufficient space in the address field. I live not that far from 1806/127/2/6/15/48/2P Huỳnh Tấn Phát, which I imagine delivery drivers just love.

Even with all the tricks, I've occasionally been unable to pay for services online, and had to find alternatives. Sometimes I'll also see Vietnam, Viet Nam and Việt Nam as separate options on a country selector. When importing something expensive from overseas, this does not exactly fill me with confidence.

[freddie_mercury]

Yeah I use those tricks too. As you say they work 90% of the time. Sometimes I have to write "P 25 Q Tan Binh" or even "P25QTanBinh" if the second address line has stupid restrictions.

I also use 700000 for HCMC even though that isn't actually accurate for anything except the main post office in District 1. You can actually put in any number since no website does anything with it. Which you sometimes have to do when they tell you that "700000 is too long for a post code, must be 5 digits or less".

AFAIK the "accurate" post codes for Vietnam (that no one ever uses) are:

https://phaata.com/thi-truong-logistics/zip-code-hcm-ho-chi-...

[jwestbury]

> They tell me I need a state or province. Hồ Chí Minh City is a city without a province. (There are five such cities that have the same rank as a province and thus aren't contained within one.)

Common in London, too -- even on British websites. They'll require a city and a county, at which point I need to enter "London" for both. Things will still be delivered correctly, fortunately.

[themoonisachees]

This is because delivery is made by people who can understand things, including limitations of software. The moment these people are replaced by robots is the moment you stop recieving mail :/

[BrandoElFollito]

Except if you need to send something to this address, why would you care what is input?

Even when using it for shipping, what I do is to repeat information. They want a "province"? I have no idea what this is (I am French) so I repeat the name of the city, or I put a region. When the letter/package Congress to France the address won't be correctly formatted anyway so they will do a best match - and it always worked without problems.

Sale for phone numbers. I usually try 0000000000 which often get rejected, and then 010101010101 which usually is accepted (sorry for the prob who uses this number in the Paris region).

[bogle]

Your address is now going to be one of my favourite tests for ever more, hope that's okay?

[xethos]

Prepare for pushback in the form of "Who the hell will be using our site from Vietnam?"

Personally, I think a correct response is "Hey man, you wanted to sell things on the World Wide Web. If you want to exclude Vietnam, Main Street has storefronts for you to rent"

[robocat]

Happened to me yesterday I’m from New Zealand, trying to buy something from a Chinese website There was obviously some localisation code for New Zealand, but 1st it incorrecly tries to validate phone number, then 2nd it asks for address and prefills the rest of it completely wrong (Canterbury is NOT a state, and it is not a mail destination , and the abbreviation CAN is not recognised by anyone as Canterbury.

I absolutely hate it when you try to give a company some money, and they just fail to close the sale!

[PinguTS]

Same problem here with ordering from AliExpress to Germany.

They try to make some localization and validation and fail greatly with that.

The province doesn't matter in German addresses at all. But when entering the ZIP code it always presented me the city as the main city in the province, which is not my city. My city is 20km away.

At the end I put everything again into the second address field, which allowed some free form input.

[soco]

It's surprising how many developers complain about this, here in HN and otherwise, yet STILL we have those crappy validations and autofill all over the internet.

[TeMPOraL]

It's worse. Few months ago we wanted to buy some specific books/toys from a local brand (we're in Poland). It was a relatively modern, small company, with appropriately modern and slick website - you'd expect everything to go smoothly, right? Unfortunately, we weren't able to complete the purchase, because whoever made their checkout page had a bright idea to integrate with...

...wait for it...

... an AI-powered address validation system, offered by some random local startup. That validation system tried to provide autocomplete and attempted to automatically segment the address in a seemingly free-form field, but something in the integration got botched, and it wasn't able to identify house numbers - and without identifying one, it would not let the check-out process to continue.

I've actually tracked down the startup making this "address validator" (who in the right mind funded them, and why companies pay for this, is beyond me); they had a demo form on the landing page, and it correctly segmented my address - which is why I know it's the integration with the particular seller that got botched. Nevertheless, I'm still in shock - why on Earth would someone do this in the first place? It's strictly worse than having multiple fields - name, street, address part 2, zip code, city, etc. Multiple fields are already bad for reasons discussed in this thread, but a single free-form field that's parsed by "AI" into colored segments as you type? What in the fuck.

[ryandrake]

Address validation is one of the major textbook cases of developers going out of their way to make their software worse.

And from the company owner's point of view: Imagine spending extra money on development that stops users from completing a purchase.

These cases are the perfect answer to "Why do we need senior developers on our team who have good judgment?" This is why--to prevent software like this from even being written in the first place.

[mauryaman16]

Yeah, hard agree on this. Companies need to actually need to make an effort to know their audience & how things works there before even launching there. But nowadays research is secondary to most of them.

[iCarrot]

There are post codes in Vietnam, believe it or not. Though I doubt any local delivery service actually look at it.

Hanoi post code is in the 100000 range (used to be 10000), Saigon's 700000

[freddie_mercury]

Yeah I know that "technically" we have post codes, though I've never met anyone who knows that or knows what their post code is. And I've never received any mail that uses it (not even from the government).

[user32489318]

Your story reminded me how Chinese students could not enroll in a well known Dutch university online, because their last name was less than4 characters long.

[mauryaman16]

Also wanted to know from your exp, what are some good apps that actually considers localisation even being an international company?

[freddie_mercury]

Off the top of my head I can't think of any that are GOOD.

But a decent number of them appear to switch off most/all validation once you select a non-US address, which I think is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. (That's if they even support a non-US address, that is.) I've never seen any data but I wonder how much help validating addresses even is.

The "must have a postal code" is by far the biggest problem. I can't recall a website that actually can cope with not having a postal code.

In practice you can put in any number and the local postal delivery here will ignore it/figure it out since it won't be the first time a foreigner has put the wrong address on something in Vietnam.

[Nars088]

I've seen some sites use Google maps API to suggest your exact address, pretty cool

[tsukikage]

Oh good grief those are annoying though. "We've found a more exact version of the address you entered" no you haven't, you've randomly substituted my neighbour's house number and dropped the county name. It's even worse for my office address: it's a large building shared by many companies; without the correct company name the receptionist cannot contact the right recipient. The APIs though like to either replace the company name with a random unrelated one or drop it entirely.

Wonder how many misdeliveries these features cause? Both my and GP's annoyances can be solved simply by leaving the entered data unmangled. I've supplied precisely what needs to go on the packaging to get the item to me. All of the text is necessary, sufficient and in the correct order. Don't change those things. You don't know better.

[TeMPOraL]

When moving in, some two years ago, to an apartment located close to the very centre of Kraków - one of the biggest and well-known cities in Poland - I discovered that Google somehow got the postal code wrong for the entire street. The code they had on record actually pointed some 20-30 kilometers outside of Kraków. It took more than a year of sending corrections to Google Maps before they finally fixed the postal code... of my building alone. The rest of the street still has the wrong code.

Want to know why I bothered to try and get it fixed all this time? Because this little mistake made it nearly impossible to order food via any of the food order services. Uber Eats, Glovo, Pyszne.pl, etc., in their infinite tech startup wisdom, all integrated with Google API to fetch postal codes based on address, and use them to filter out restaurants that can deliver to the user's location. With my address mistakenly mapping to a village 20+ kilometers outside of Kraków, do you care to guess how many options I had to order from?

That, plus it also messed up ordering taxis via FreeNow and Bolt, which also integrate with Google API for stupid reasons. This also means the drivers need to use separate apps to navigate around the center, because Google doesn't have data on which roads are banned for traffic except buses and taxis, and the parent companies are too cheap to license from a provider that has this data. All while in the apps themselves, if your route starts, ends, or even crosses anywhere near the city center, the estimated time data shoots up to some ridiculous values, while the map gets entirely confused, as Google Maps integration is adamant that the route we're on is physically impossible.

[themoonisachees]

Shopify does this to my address. I live at 106 and Shopify sites like to decide that I live at 106 bis, the next building over. That building only has a shared mailbox between three families, so packages that end up there are lost forever with no accountability.

[jiehong]

Sadly true in every country.

Recently been to China, and now that everything requires WeChat, it's extremely convenient if you're local, but as a tourist things are very difficult when you don't have:

- a Chinese phone number;

- a WeChat account with payment activated;

- a Chinese ID card.

Wanna read the menu? Only if you have wechat and an internet connection to scan that QR code (many places have no physical menus).

Wanna pay with cash you've just exchanged at the airport? Sorry, nobody uses cash anymore (many shops won't accept cash at all).

Wanna book a train ticket online before you reach China to plan your trip? Sorry, you've got to be Chinese for that and have a local number.

Wanna pay with your credit card something in a big mall? They might accept it, but their IT system might not always manage to communicate with your bank and it may fail for no reason.

Albeit, the opposite problem is true in Germany: many places only accept cash, or only accept EC cards, aka special credit cards issued by German banks only.

[arrowsmith]

> many places have no physical menus

I hate this trend so much

[voytec]

My simplest solution - changing restaurants. I absolutely don't trust the security of mobile devices, won't be scanning unknown QR codes, opening websites with unknown 3rd party spying garbage nor installing spyware-infused apps in order to get a glass of wine.

[Dalewyn]

I can understand why it's happening, at least:

* Don't need to purchase paper.

* Don't need to purchase or contract a printer.

* Can change the menu willy nilly.

* It's in line with the current environmentalism fad.

But that said: If the restaurant can't be arsed to provide me with requisite-free information on what god damn food they serve, I can't be arsed to provide my god damn money for their time.

[robjan]

Different eating culture. In China it's not uncommon to eat out every day whereas in the west it's usually an experience (unless you are eating out in McDonald's). Hence, cheap eats places tend to automate to save on costs.

[Saigonautica]

Yeah, this is the main reason I haven't been to China in a while. It's quite nearby for me, but just too difficult. In principle, I would love to go to Chengdu or Shenzhen, but end up going to Singapore instead because I don't have the time to deal with the logistics.

On the other hand, I do glean some amusement that the region where cash was invented, no longer accepts cash.

[thatjoeoverthr]

Related: requiring one specify a US state. I hit this yesterday, with a modern AI SAAS!

Once I hit this with zip code validation. Knowing that the credit card processor doesn't actually check this, I found a particular state (Arkansas) that happened to include my Polish postal code. This worked and I paid my bill.

[CalRobert]

On a recent trip to the US I found using 00000 works.

[nicbou]

In Canada use H0H 0H0. This is Santa's postal code.

[tommiegannert]

A hotel in Sweden used an external booking system for breakfast slots (remnants of CoVID, I guess). To receive breakfast, I had to provide name, email address and a phone number. And read a ~15 phone-screens ToS.

Strangely, no one pointed out the obviously fake email address or phone number when I had the breakfast. Perhaps it wasn't needed after all.

[noirscape]

Oh that crap is super common on restaurant wifi too around here.

The funny thing is that they can't actually validate the email address so most just accept whatever (sometimes with a small extra filter to avoid stuff like [e-mail]).

[tommiegannert]

I always use example.com, since it's reserved for examples, and guaranteed that no one is bothered by it. :)

[red-iron-pine]

In 8th grade, long ago, my buddy created a hotmail account: deepthroat50005.

he thought it was based on Metal Gear Solid's reference to the Watergate thing. Didn't get the other connotations -- at least not at first. He disowned it, and we laughed about it for a while.

I still use that email for anything that requires an email but I DGAF about. Hasn't been rejected yet...

[kwanbix]

Ah, the ToS. I sometimes download a game in my Xbox Series X and the TOS is crazy long. What the fck for?

[asdajksah2123]

> This prevents me from renting a Bixi bicycle in Montreal.

While I suspect this is a screwup on the part of Bixi, you're making the mistake of confusing bikeshare with bike rental. Don't worry though, you're in good company, including many companies that operate bikeshare.

Bikeshare is meant to be a transportation service to get people from point A to point B. More often than not tourists don't use it that way and even when they do, they would be better served using bikes that are not part of the bikeshare system so they're able to go slower than a commuter would and enjoy the sights on the way, as well as stop randomly to checkout something that might look interesting.

Tourists are almost always better off renting a bike for a day or even a few hours than using the bikeshare system.

Many bikeshare systems would in fact be better served restricting access only to long term members.

[rerx]

I disagree. As a tourist I would usually prefer to use bike share, similarly to the systems I'm used to at home.

Getting and returning bikes at dedicated rental shops is quite a hassel, typically much more expensive, and unnecessary if I just want a simple city bike.

In fact I suspect that it's often intentional that tourists have a hard times registering for bike share systems. They would greatly impact the business of preexisting bike rental shops.

[stokesr]

While I myself am a long-term user of my local bikeshare network and more often than not see tourists renting private bikes by the day, I have to disagree with the idea of restricting access for short-term users.

It's always been super handy for when friends come to visit and we can all take the same method of transportation, and it means they can afford to park further out of town where the free car spaces are and cycle into the city centre.

[CalRobert]

Tourists also like to go from point A to point B. I use citibike in NYC when I'm a tourist for this use case.

[nicbou]

Bike rental places were driven out of business by Bixi.

[AmericanChopper]

It’s worse in a lot of other places around the world. A lot of vendors in Asia won’t accept credit card payments from foreign BIN numbers. Want to buy a train or plane ticket from the local service provider? Too bad. Want to top up a SIM card? Definitely not. A lot of those places also have local payment wallets (like TNG, GoPay, GrabPay…) that are incredibly ubiquitous, and entirely inaccessible without a local bank account. In most of those places it’s the local governments fault rather than the vendors fault specifically, but still incredibly frustrating.

[WeylandYutani]

Dutch banks all got together some 15 years ago to devise the perfect online payment system: iDeal. Pretty much everyone uses it. Checkmate PayPal and Visa card.

But the best secondary effect was that it locks out foreign banks who can't be arsed to set up a local branch and apply for a banking license.

[WirelessGigabit]

Except that it has absolutely no protection after you've paid. You have no recourse with iDeal. The money has been sent.

How often do you read on Dutch forums [1] whether they paid with iDeal? Because if you do, your only recourse is to either sue them (which the Dutch rarely do) or open a dispute with the Thuiswinkel Waarborg [2].

For as long as I bought stuff online in The Netherlands I used a credit card. If they didn't offer it I'd find someone else.

[1] https://tweakers.net (tweaking as in tinkering, not the other kind)

[2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuiswinkel_Waarborg

[kwanbix]

Yeah, the same thing happened when I move to Germany, but the other way around.

Some app, don't recall which, would not accept my Argentinean phone number.

I now want to try Cargaroo or something like that, but I am not willing to give them my CC information and they don't have paypal.