In theory it’s a viable alternative to Amazon
The basic situation: I wanted an album. It was there on iTunes. iTunes supposedly took PayPal: I had funds that were parked in PayPal; this seemed a good match. So I pay via PayPal, they give me the item, and… my PayPal account was not charged.
Good, right? Wrong. Several phone calls and various emails later, it turns out that they’re still trying to authorize my PayPal account (PayPal has no record of this being attempted). And you know what that means: they’ll eventually figure it out, which means that they’ll eventually charge my PayPal account, which had better have that money in it at that exact amount of time or else there’s going to be a whole new set of problems. And no, I can’t change my payment method on this order to that of, say, a credit or debit card. And I expect that canceling the order itself is going to be equally impossible, even though I would delete the album because I apparently didn’t actually buy it, dammit. So I supposed that I have to keep about ten bucks in my PayPal account for probably… forever, now.
The process is just much simpler under Amazon. And I’m not saying that because I happen to be an Amazon Associate.
Moe Lane
PS: This is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and I feel bad for the iTunes customer service rep who has to deal with my problem. But if they’re having trouble with authorizing a payment, I should be able to simply say Put it on this card and see if it goes through without too much fuss.
Seriously, did iTunes hire the idiots that developed the Obamacare websites or something?
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I wish you luck in getting it straightened out.
In my experience, iTunes has a couple of days delay in charging for small purchases. I think they want to aggregate purchases to reduce the fixed merchant overhead for processing a charge, and I suspect when people buy music, they might make a few purchases within a day or so. Just a guess.