HACKER Q&A
📣 dingosity

Anyone else having problems checking out @ Better World Books?


I think I found a bug related to checking out with PayPal. The checkout page keeps asking me for my phone number and then keeps forgetting it. I double-checked and PayPal has my phone number, so if they (Better World Books) were trying to populate the phone number field with data they got from PayPal, it should be there.

I like BWB... they're standing up to the man (Amazon), run a prison book program and donate books to people who may not be able to afford them otherwise.

But I'm curious if other people who use BWB have run into this problem. If so, we might be able to get them to fix it. Maybe also there's a BWB employee who reads HN. I filed a support request via their web page, but I fear their response is just going to be: "meh. works for me."

  👤 dingosity Accepted Answer ✓
Aha. It looks like BWB changed the schema on their customer record DB so the front-end pre-payment page is looking for the phone number field somewhere other than where my record(s) stores it. You can go to the account page and see some weirdness with the address records. Some views of the same record show a phone number, others don't. I was able to fix it by deleting my existing address and adding it again (address records contain phone numbers (or maybe that's what they were changing?)). But delete the address record, add it back and select "default shipping" and/or "default billing" and you should be able to complete the front-end order creation process.

Or maybe your record isn't borked like mine is.

So far it doesn't seem like I was double-billed or anything, but I trust the BWB guys to resolve that if it does happen. But fulfillment might be borked, so let's see what happens when their back-end fulfillment systems try to make sense of this order. But, again, I trust them to fix problems if they arise. This is the first complaint I've had w/ them in over three years of being a customer.