Update: Digital River Zip Code Checkout Issue
About a week after I published my first post regarding Digital River’s broken checkout, I received a blog comment from Jeff, a Digital River employee, inquiring about the issue. It is nice to know that there are some people at a few companies out there actively involved in researching and resolving issues they might not hear about through conventional channels.
Unfortunately, the checkout is still broken and I know of at least one valid zip code and city combination that Digital River’s checkout refuses to accept: Richmond, Va 23233. If you want to purchase software from a retailer using Digital River’s provisioning system and happen to live in Richmond, Va. or another affected area, you are out of luck.
Most annoying about this situation is that Digital River does not provide any meaningful way to contact them via phone or email, especially so if you do not have an order number. Which, by the way, is impossible to obtain if you cannot complete check out. While Jeff’s assistance has been superb, the folks at Digital River in charge of service delivery need to investigate how they can better allow people to reach them. Until then, Digital River will continue to lose untold sales for the software companies relying upon their services.
Originally, Jeff reported that the issue seemed to be with a third-party information provider, but as of the update yesterday, the problem is in-house at Digital River. The fix is scheduled to be released during the next maintenance window on September 25th. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that this will allow Richmonders (and possibly others) to once again purchase software from online retailers.
Jeff, thank you for your stellar support and understanding and keep up the good work; you might rub off on others.
Filed under: Business, Technology
Hi,
Digitial River released the fix for the zip code into production shortly before 2:00pm CDT on Sept. 26th. I believe there were a number of city / zipcode problems that were fixed at the same time.
Thanks for your patience.
Jeff
Hi,
One more thing, the zipcode problem was in the code and data provided by one of our suppliers. We needed to get an update from the vendor, add to our release, and do the regression testing.
Thanks,
Jeff