Sorry, but we don’t want your money
I don’t normally wear bright clothes – but recently I have been seen sporting a bright red Rugby Shirt.
The breast displays two small emblems – on the left is the manufacturer’s trade mark: “Kukri”, and on the right is a small embroidered Kyrgyz flag.
It’s the Rugby shirt of the Kyrgyz Rugby Federation and I have been try to get one of these shirts for over two years. I haven’t found anywhere here in Bishkek that sells them, but there are a couple of websites that do offer them. The only trouble is that, after you’ve selected them and put them “in your basket”, and proceeded to the checkout, you then have to pay for them. That shouldn’t be a problem, I have a credit card and it’s easy to buy things over the internet using a credit card, isn’t it?
Apparently not.
Maybe I haven’t got the exact wording, but this was the gist of the message I got: “Sorry but your IP address indicates that you are located in a part of the world which our payments engine doesn’t service.”
It didn’t help that the card was a British card, issued by a British bank with a billing address in the UK. I was able to enter all that information into the form … and they could have checked. No … the problem was my IP address … I was using a computer here in Kyrgyzstan – and they weren’t going to accept that.
So, here I am in Kyrgyzstan, and I can’t buy the Kyrgyz national rugby shirt.
Not long ago I was talking to a friend over a beer. John’s recently started a long term contract here in Bishkek and I had taken him to see the Russian Orthodox Cathedral … the blue onion domes, the myriad of icons, the remains of Saint Irakily, (the only Saint that Kyrgyzstan has produced to date) and we were relaxing over lunch, (and that beer), in a restaurant just next door to the National Stadium. It was a holiday and there was a large crowd … so I asked one of the waiters what was going on. “National Games”, he told me, “followed by a Rugby game.” You can imagine our surprise … and that’s how the conversation turned to Rugby, and my difficulties in buying a Kyrgyz national rugby shirt.
John offered to order one for me when he next visited the UK, and to use part of his valuable baggage allowance to bring it back for me … which he did and so I am now the proud owner of a Kyrgyzstan official national Rugby shirt … one of the few people in the country with one.
I presume the blanket ban on accepting payment by credit card over the internet from “surfers” in Kyrgyzstan is to do with preventing fraud and identity theft. I suppose that as a consumer and credit card holder, I have to welcome this … but it does seem indiscriminate (affecting everybody in the country) and it can be very frustrating.
Now, I don’t often use my credit card over the internet … it’s not that I am afraid of identity theft, although obviously it is an issue. It’s just that there are so few occasions when it is useful. Once you have identified something you want to buy, ordered it, and the money has been deducted from your account, you then have to wait for it to be delivered. If you chose the ordinary postal options, that can take some time, and if you use an international courier firm that can often cost more than the goods themselves.
This is not the only problem I have had buying things over the internet with my credit card. There has been other occasions when the payment transaction engine wouldn’t accept my card because I was attaching to the internet from a computer in Kyrgyzstan. I have tried contacting the site to see if we can find some other solution, but after exchanging a few emails I was told that the only way that they could accept payment was through the payment system that they used. I still don’t understand why this was so … I may be wrong of course, but the impression I got was that it seemed they just didn’t want to make a sale … they didn’t want to take my money.
The problem isn’t limited to credit card payments. I don’t think there are any sites that are blocked in Kyrgyzstan – unlike in some countries such as China or Iran, but there are problems in downloading data from some.
I understand that the BBC don’t allow Amazon or other sites to sell their tapes, CD’s and DVD’s to certain countries, (such as Kyrgyzstan), because they have copyright concerns … It’s a pity because I do miss programmes like “Just a Minute” or “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue”. It’s possible to listen to these over the the internet but it would be nice to have them in a format where I could listen to them in the car, or have them lull me to sleep as I lie in bed. It would be great, for example, if there was a podcast of these programmes, but there isn’t. It’s odd that I can download episodes of the Newsquiz from the Friday Night Comedy Show podcast … which is great … but Newsquiz doesn’t have “One Song to the Tune of Another” or “Mornington Crescent”. OK – I realize that only Brits will understand that reference, (and not all of them at that), but suffice it to say that Mornington Crescent is somewhat of a cult in Britain!. It’s a pity that I can’t download the latest episodes, just because I live in Kyrgyzstan.
As an aside, talking of podcasts, I would like to subscribe to the BBC’s Jazz Library podcast … but they won’t let me … I am tempted to say once again that it is “because I live in Kyrgyzstan” … but, actually, the BBC website does say that the podcast is only available for download in the UK, so people in New Zealand, America, France and Germany and so on are also subject to the same restriction as I am.
Bishkek