International payments with CCBill

According to our statistics, we get visitors from 229 countries (probably more countries than actually exist as a few islands are being counted when they are not strictly speaking countries). This presents a particular challenge when it comes to online payments. We recently added CCBill as a payment option for premium ads on the site. Seems to be working OK for some people, but we are seeing a large number of failed transactions and getting lot of emails from frustrated users, “why does it say my card is blocked, when I know it isn’t?”, “I called CCBill and they said they do not accept credit cards issued in my country” or “I am trying to use my British credit card in Dubai and it doesn’t work”.

This is obviously a problem, so we decided we needed to only display the CCBill option in countries where our users were going to be able to actually use it. This led to this kafkaesque interaction where we tried to get a list of countries from which they will accept credit cards…

I feel a little sorry for Angel V at this point as helpdesk is pretty tough and it becomes more like helldesk when companies implement stupid policies like this one. I am not sure what they are trying to protect, but it doesn’t make sense to have Afghanistan or Cuba as country options on your payment gateway when you have no intention of accepting any payments from there.