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.
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#/media/File:ROC_Natio...
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"
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.
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.
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.
I absolutely hate it when you try to give a company some money, and they just fail to close the sale!
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.
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.
Hanoi post code is in the 100000 range (used to be 10000), Saigon's 700000
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.
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-...
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).
...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.
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.
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.
I hate this trend so much
* 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.
On the other hand, I do glean some amusement that the region where cash was invented, no longer accepts cash.
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.
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 [email protected]).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.