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I was expecting the story to be that even "trivial" problems have complications once I saw it was about zip-codes. :)

A few reasons I've seen where assumptions about how zip-codes work lead to not taking money:

Ireland - no zip-codes (outside Dublin) - dont do mandatory fields

UK - numbers and letters - dont assume only numbers in zip-code

Brazil - 9 digit codes - dont assume max of 6 or 8 characters

I'm always annoyed by forms that make "state" a required field. Yes, my country does have provinces, but they're utterly irrelevant to any kind of address or other info.

I live in Shanghai. China does have provinces, and they show up in your address. Shanghai isn't part of one; it's its own division of equal rank. Amazon requires a "state", though, so I had to have things sent to myself at <street>, Shanghai, Shanghai China.

This is nothing. In Indonesia nearly half of the population do not have a surname. In Algeria many people have "around 19xx" as their birthday, hand written on their passport. So much for mandatory form fields...

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