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Comment by KVFinn | Hacker News Reader

Just generally, Korea seems to have some weird legacy internet stuff.

It's pretty hard to find places you can order in Korea, or from Korea, that don't require a Korean phone number. There are services and stores that exist just to buy things from other places in Korea and reship or resell them to people both in and out of the country, just because people don't have Korean phone numbers.

Even online purchases like audiobooks often requires a local phone number.

They sure make it hard to spend for any non Korean to spend money.

And it's not every site, there are some huge retailers (www.aladin.co.kr for example) that do not require it. So it's got to be just that most websites never bothered to build a checkout process that works without a phone number?

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I once ordered something online from an EU country. I entered my phone number (from another EU country) in the international format (+xx xxxxxxxxx).

The website silently mangled my phone number into a local number.

I had to e-mail them and tell them "hey, this is not actually my phone number, just some number from your own country that may or may not exist."

You'd be surprised, there are many sites that don't even support names longer than some arbitrary limit like 5 or 10 characters because Korean names are typically 3 to 4 characters long.

The phone number is typically required for real-name verification. Pair that with the low character limit above and a lot of stuff just breaks.

I think non-Korean customers just are not much of a consideration for Korean companies unfortunately.

It goes both ways. Some US sites don’t allow spaces or hyphens in given names.

Most US websites I deal with throw a random error when I give them my name. And it's not even weird, just one non-ascii character. Especially annoying since they always say something to the effect of "Write your legal name here, exactly as it's on your documents, do check twice it's the same".

I know sometimes it's because of legacy ASCII protocols in finance/airlines (but sometimes it's just bad databases/regexes). I know how to fix it, but please just don't say in the error message that my name is "invalid".

Exactly the same in Japan; moreover, many e-commerce sites reject foreign credit cards, even those of international brands (Visa/MasterCard).

What I heard was that payment providers charge higher fees for allowing foreign cards, so website owners (who focus on domestic business anyways) just won't bother.

>What I heard was that payment providers charge higher fees for allowing foreign cards, so website owners (who focus on domestic business anyways) just won't bother.

Here at least that doesn't seem to be the blocking issue. Or at least I often see foreign CC payment options in the list, but if you try to use the option you still need a Korean phone number in the checkout process (and they confirm with an SMS, you can't just type in whatever.)

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