Failure Online Subscription Service

I had the intention of subscribing to some magazines for a while but never took the time to actually do so. Last month, I looked at several magazines that I was interested in and decided on two that would be worthwhile to subscribe to. One was Wired and the other was National Geographic Traveler. I checked on the newsstand price at Indigo and find that an annual subscription does save a lot of money. Plus it’ll arrive from mail automatically which means I don’t actually have to go buy it. So without further delays, I went online to make the subscriptions. Wired subscriptions was $10 for 12 issues (1 year). Quite a deal! Then I looked again, it’s $40 for Canadian subscription. A little disappointed at that price, I went over to the National Geographic Traveler website. There was a deal of 2 for 1. Two years of subscriptions for the price of one which was $17.95. Looking closely to the tiny terms and conditions at the bottom, it was for U.S. addresses only. Canadian address cost $34 and no 2 for 1 deal. That was last month.

Yesterday, I was reading one of Wired articles which reminded me of my earlier intention to subscribe to this magazine. I thought what the heck. I can’t dwell on US prices being cheaper than Canadian forever. So, last night I went ahead and ordered a year of Wired magazine through buysub.com, which should arrive in 6 weeks. Today, I recalled that I also wanted the National Geographic Traveler. I went on their website and clicked subscribe. I was redirected to another buysub.com page, customized for the selected magazine. I clicked on the “Canadian and International Subscription” link. Filled out the order form and submitted. I was expecting a confirmation page, but my form came back with an error. Well first when I was filling out the form, my city which contains 15 characters didn’t fit in the City field. I had to be abbreviations for it. Then, the following error was shown.

Living in Canada, I obviously use postal code which was clearly entered. I thought maybe the form was a bit stupid and require something to be in the zip code text field as well. So I entered some random numbers and submitted again. Surprise! I got another error.

I’ve even tried a real zip code and the same error persists. I gave up on subscribing to National Geographic Traveler.

Posted in Thoughts
Tagged as magazine