I have already posted my question in Yahoo! Answers but due to insufficient and unsatisfactory answers, I had opted to look for help in this place. The situation is as follows:
I live in the Philippines and recently, my mom permitted me to use her credit card to buy a gadget (i.e. the Sony PRS-650) that was only available in the US and Europe. Thankfully, I have a friend who is studying in Boston and quite coincidentally, will be returning to our country on the 18th of December. I asked her if I could have the gadget shipped to her house in order that she could hand it to me once she returns here. I’ve already submitted an online order using my mom’s credit card yesterday and a few days from now, the gadget should have arrived.
Based on the answer I received from Y! Answers, there is no need for my mom (or anyone else for that matter) to sign the bill. So here are my updated questions:
Sony automatically used my friend’s address as the billing address. This is despite the fact that my mom’s Mastercard is based in the Philippines. How will my mom pay the bill? Does she need the US-furnished bill? If yes, can we pay our outstanding balance here in the Philippines? If no, then will our local credit card company send us one in our home?
What currency will be reflected in the bill?
Thank you for anyone who would answer these questions. As can be clearly seen my mom and I are new to these things.
I’m a bit confused by your question. As far as the bill is concerned, it won’t be any different then any other credit card bill she’s received. It doesn’t matter where the item is shipped to. The bill will show the charge in the currency of where you purchased it and it’ll be converted to your local currency.
ETA: When you purchase something online there’s never anything (related to the credit card) to sign.
ETA2, don’t ask questions at Yahoo Answers. You might as well ask them in the ebaumsworld comment section.
Then for what purpose is the billing address for? I was confused by this since I read a post that if the billing address does not match the address in the credit card, the purchase will be void.
The billing address is sort of a leftover; there are a few old-fashioned companies (easyjet, I’m looking at you) which send a physical bill. Neither my banks nor my government give a flying fig what “billing address” is on bills, so long as the name is clearly mine and any security procedures have been followed properly (I’m self-employed and many of my internet purchases are business-related travel, therefore deductible).
As JoeyP said, on internet purchases there is never a paper to be signed. Depending on the security procedures of the vendor and of your credit card’s issuer, there are different methods to verify that the card you’re using is acceptable. Some places just ask for the “confirmation code” on the back; one of my banks takes me to a webpage where I have to enter my PIN and a second, longer PIN; my other bank sends a SMS to my cellphone and takes me to a webpage where I have to enter a number I got in the SMS…
I’ve purchased items online with a billing address different from the ones my banks have (I have both a “permanent address” and a “correspondence address” with both banks), sending them to yet another address. I move a lot, and often from country to country, and may be purchasing from a vendor in yet-another-country. Never had a problem. The few times I’ve had problems, it has been during the payment process (the secure processes of the vendor and CC-issuer were incompatible); whenever that’s gone well, the whole process went swimmingly.
As for which currency is listed, that varies by location and CC-issuer. My banks provide it in local currency only, but I don’t know what will be the case in the Philippines. Your best source for this would be your own bank.
This is security check. It’s admittedly a weak one, but it’s really in place more to protect the merchant.
The company will check the billing address you give them to make sure it matches the billing address for the credit card (they can’t see the CC billing address, but the machine will give them a yes or no). If it matches, you’re good to go. If it doesn’t match then each company has their own policy on what to do (ship anyways, cancel the order and mark it as fraudulent, call the customer and get it cleared up etc…)
As long as it matches (as does the CVV code) the merchant has done all they can do to verify that this isn’t a fraudulent use of the credit card. If the card is stolen, but the merchant has the correct CVV and billing address (and even more so if the ‘ship to’ is the same as ‘bill to’) they’re typically off the hook for the bad charges.
If they do this (not everybody does), and it beeps “wrong!”, it will do so during the online payment process. If you were able to complete that process without a hitch, it means they didn’t check. Sometimes you get that “billing address doesn’t match card’s billing address” although it does, and it’s due to process incompatibility.
Oh, also ask your bank how will the charge show up. One of my banks will list things as “purchase in a store” or "“UK store” (gee, dude, real helpful), while the other one gives me the actual legal name of the payee (I prefer this one, obviously).
That’s true* but smaller merchants (like myself) don’t always have online processors. When someone orders something on my website, I physically print out the credit card number, walk it over to the credit card terminal in my brick and mortar store, key in the card number and then shred the printed out version. This typically doesn’t happen until the order is just about ready to ship.
We have priced out adding the ability to process online, but the higher risk associated with taking orders online brought the cost up to what we pay for the higher risk of keying in a card at the terminal. At this point we won’t make the switch unless the volume becomes to much to do manually.
again, depending in store policy partially for the reason you suggested, sometimes there’s just formatting errors that cause a problem, for example, I’ve had addresses that are W234N33323. Sometimes the machine wants 234, sometimes it wants 23433323, sometimes 33323 etc. Since a lot of the cards I run are recurring, I just make a little note of what I tried until I find the one that works.
They (at least every machine I’ve worked with) have only checked the number portion of the address. They tend to get tripped up not with Road vs Rd, but rather what to use when the numerical portion has both numbers and letters in it.
So my old apartment had an address similar to “1 Fred St, Apt. D5”. But about half the time, I write it as “D5-1 Fred St”. Would that cause an error–not setting the apartment number apart? Or writing “Suite” instead of “Apt.”?
The system needs to make meaningful distinctions, and ignore non-meaningful distinctions. Some webpages I’ve used when ordering things online have a separate field for “apartment number” and each other part of the street address, and some smoosh it all together, but separate the city, province, postal code, etc, and some just provide two lines for “address”.
In that address, the CC processor is almost certainly expecting “1”, anything else will result in a negative result.
Also, I’m not sure why you would write D5-1 Fred St. Hell, that would cause an error with someone driving around just trying to find the damn address.
It’s fairly common around here to prepend the suite or apartment number onto the street address number, separating them with a hyphen. Addresses like “2000 Bloor St West, Apt. 201” can be written as “201-2000 Bloor St W” without problem.
What isn’t common is apartment identifiers with letters in them. My old address did raise a few eyebrows when I moved there.
I too would have thought the billing address was used as a way of verifying the card (as in, if you’d stolen the card or gotten the number illegally, you were not likely to have the billing address).
But as others have said, the bill comes from the bank that issued the card, not from the site where the purchase was made. So your mother will get her bill from the card issuer regardless of what you entered.
I used my own US issued credit card with a US billing address in Canada, and the statement came to my (US) home just like any other statement, and indicated the charges that I had made in Canadian Dollars, with the conversion rate the bank was using and the final amount in US Dollars.
It went something like :
American Place 53.25
Shopping, Eh. 22.4 Foreign Currency CAD (1 CAD = .95 USD) 21.28
