Hacker News Reader

Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

I bought it - but why do you need my billing address/phone number for an ebook. I was glad to see the PayPal option, but I was slightly put off by giving you all that info.

I can see wanting my name for doing a watermark and my email so you can send me an update when the next book in the series comes out, but the rest seemed unnecessary so you might want to consider removing them as "Required Fields".

View on HN

I had the same reaction "This is cool, but why do they need my phone number just for an ebook download?" I went ahead anyway, but it definitely struck me as odd.

As a second nitpick here, some countries don't have states. You shouldn't make it a required field either.

That's a great catch, Mandar. We'll have to do some behind the scenes work to figure out how to resolve state/province issues. Apologies!!! It's required 'cos that's what the credit card companies need to process your info.

All good questions. I'm using WooCommerce theme for WordPress, which ties into PayPal, and those are required fields. We don't store any personal information... unless you choose to create an account (and then you can modify that account, too!). Oh, and - obviously - we don't collect or store any credit card info; we leave all of that to the experts at PayPal. Sorry if it's a problem at all!!!

I'm glad to help you with that. I ran into the same problem too. Didn't want to leave my personal info when you're already going through paypal.

I also bought it, and didn't have a problem entering my information assuming it was for billing reasons. Then I see the paypal option which was a huge turn off, but understandable since it's a new company.

I actually disliked the entire check out process. Database connection errors, failed to accept a strong password (randomly generated and including symbols) and failed with an uninformative error requiring me to navigate back to the checkout process and re-enter all my information. Then I check my email and my user name and password have been sent back to me. Everything about the site is great until you get to the checkout process which is really clunky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com