Bad data validation: How many digits make a bank account number?

In which Amazon UK Associates have finally paid me – Hooray!

Back in November I applied to be an Amazon Associate, and was lucky enough to make about £20 from the Christmas shopping season.

Later in January I received an earnings report from them, and when I logged into my Amazon Associates account it said they had paid me 2 weeks earlier, but nothing had arrived in my bank account.

I emailed customer support and we went back and forth 3 times with them asking me to check my account again each time in case the payment had turned up. In the meantime, I had figured out what must have happened.

My bank account, which is at one of the biggest banks in the UK, has a seven digit number. Many e-commerce websites apparently assume an eight digit number. In some cases, eg TradeDoubler, the company that owns the website obviously knows about this and either provides instructions or deals with the shorter account number in its own way, but in either case it works. In other cases, such as when signing up for PayPal UK, the data entry form includes data validation that does not allow a ‘non-standard’ account number to get through. The first time this happened, I emailed my bank’s technical support and got a helpful reply telling me to add an extra zero at the beginning of the number, and this has also worked. But the Amazon Associates UK application form just took my number without saying anything, and then 3 months later when it was time to pay me it didn’t work.

So I suggested to customer services that this could have been what happened, and I re-entered my bank account number with an extra zero at the start, and my query was eventually passed to the finance department.

A few weeks later I logged into my Amazon Associates account again and saw they had posted messages telling people about problems with bank account numbers, and that they should update their details if there had been payment problems they would email if a repeat attempt at payment didn’t go through. But I still hadn’t received my payment. So I updated my details again in case that would trigger off some new automated process that they had set up to deal with this sort of thing, and the message went away.

And then it took ages for my bank statement to arrive. Nothing had changed in my Amazon payment record, but when I eventually got my statement I found the payment had gone through on 4th April.

I was massively relieved, because I’ve heard of other big companies that just have a policy of not paying people.

I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes at Amazon UK – their application form obviously had a serious data validation error, and I never heard anything from their finance department, but to be fair their initial customer services people were polite and helpful, they kept their associates informed as a group, and they did get there in the end with the payment. I’d say my faith has been restored – perhaps I’ll go for the aStore after all!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 6:54 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, E-Commerce, Electronic Payment, Security, Technical, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.