Headaches

What I’m about to tell you is the plain truth. I haven’t made anything up and I have decided not to change the names, because nobody here is innocent.

A few days ago I decided to buy something in the US and import it through ChileBox, the Miami mailbox service from Chilexpress. Everything was going fairly well: the item arrived in Miami and I was notified by email that I had to enter the invoice in the system, along with the product’s FOB value, so it could be shipped as soon as possible.

All sorted, the shipment dispatched to Santiago.

Yesterday, Friday, I was told by email that I had to pay the taxes and the service costs. I looked closely at the amount of the excessive taxes they charge us; they are so out of proportion that they deserve a piece of their own. But I swallowed my libertarian ideas and got ready to pay, because after all it’s the only way to get my product. And that’s where the second headache began (the first one is the taxes, but that one is a permanent ache).

ChileBox only lets you pay online with four banks. Over the years I have had accounts at three of them; I closed my account at the third one a month ago, fed up with its terrible service. Not that the bank I’m with now is the eighth wonder of the world, but at least they make an effort to, as the gringos say, “suck less”. ChileBox has no credit card payment through WebPay! (OK, here’s another topic for a deep analysis. Not everything is ChileBox’s fault on this point, and I think all of us who have worked with payment systems suspect the reason, but let’s get on with the story.)

The fourth online payment option is BancoEstado. There is a fifth option, a bank transfer to ChileBox’s account, but they warn you that in that case the shipment is delayed. I ruled that one out because I have already sat through that horror movie. And finally, you can always print the invoice and pay at a ChileExpress office, but I was determined to pay online; I didn’t want to leave my house. Big mistake.

I went with the fourth online payment option. I remembered that my wife has a CuentaRut, the basic debit account from Banco Estado, the state bank. I deposited the money there and went back to the ChileBox site ready to pay.

Here comes the third headache. I had done all the package tracking from my Mac using Safari. When the time came to pay, I pressed the payment buttons and nothing happened on the page.

Well, that tends to happen, so I decided to use Chrome. I logged in to the site and navigated to the point of pressing the BancoEstado payment button, and suddenly a popup window appears telling me that the session has expired!

Between the “login” and my pressing the payment button, fifteen seconds can’t have gone by. The shortest session in history!

Logout, try again, and the same little message: “session expired”.

A parenthesis here. Many sites in Chile have problems with session handling, especially with the Chrome+Mac combination. I once looked into the cause and apparently it’s a known problem, discussed in many technical forums, but it seems nobody has taken the time to analyze it. It’s as if service companies believed that in Chile people only use Internet Explorer 6 and Windows 95.

OK, I solved the problem with the old trick of going incognito in Chrome. When I finally got past the session problems, I ran into BancoEstado.

Let me take a deep breath for a moment...

This is where the migraine starts. Pressing the BancoEstado payment button opens a “popup” window (because in Chile all payments must be made in a “popup”; it must be a “best practice”) where I’m asked for a RUT, the national ID number, and a user password (another “best practice”: using the RUT for everything). I’m using my wife’s account, remember. I enter her RUT and her password. The screen for “step 1” appears, confirming the amount and that I’m about to make the payment to ChileBox. Excellent. I press the button to continue to step 2 and a message appears saying that the account cannot make that kind of payment.

I close Chrome and repeat the process, but this is where the script worthy of an early-career Roger Corman movie begins. My wife’s account gets blocked. Blocked! She can no longer operate online and has to call a phone number at the bank.

And to make things worse, I, the big dummy, decide to ask my oldest daughter for help. She also has a CuentaRut she doesn’t use, so I could repeat the process with her help. And they blocked her account too!

I’m not making this up. Two accounts blocked for unknown reasons. But that’s not all. We’re just getting started.

I decided to go get the money back through an ATM; my wife lends me her RedBanc card. I head to a gas station, one of the few that still have ATMs (because apparently “something” has led to their removal; it must be that Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft ;).

This particular place has two ATMs, which is why I picked it. See how clever I am! One of the ATMs is out of service, of course. The second one works, but there’s a line.

On average, Chileans take between 2.5 and 3.5 minutes to withdraw money from an ATM. I know because I have measured it several times while waiting. You can actually withdraw money in 30 or 45 seconds, given the design of the interface and the latency of the transactions with the bank (I know because I have measured that too). I have always wondered why they take so long, but I never thought I would find the answer minutes later that Friday. I wait at least fifteen minutes and finally face the ATM. I insert the card and select “Cuenta Vista”, the demand account. I choose the amount to withdraw and a message appears saying I can’t withdraw that amount because the balance is zero. Alarmed, I ask for a balance; after a while the amount I had deposited appears, minus 300 pesos. Because BancoEstado takes three hundred pesos from you when you check your balance. Beautiful.

I try to withdraw the money again, this time with only half. No problems. Then I try the other half and again the message that there is no balance in the account. The solution: check the balance, and the money appears (minus 300 pesos). That’s how I had to withdraw a different amount (a multiple of CLP 5,000, of course) and put together as best I could part of the money I had deposited.

Now I have a possible explanation for why people take so long at the ATM: they must be BancoEstado customers.

The next day (today, Saturday) I print the bill from the ChileBox site and go to an office to pay, with cash and a little piece of paper, as if we were in 1984.

I’m not going to tell you what happened at the branch because you would think I’m exaggerating. I’ll just add that if you want to contribute data to the debate about the quality of education in Chile, go pay a bill and take note of everything that happens.

So those were this weekend’s headaches. I had to write them down, to vent. In retrospect they are tragicomic, but...

In general I don’t see anyone happy with e-commerce web services in Chile; very few of them must work properly. I’m not going to defend the place where I work either: “let him who is without sin...”

But some cases are extreme. It’s also true that I made several mistakes. I should have printed the bill and paid in person from the start, but I trusted that everything could be solved online. How naive I am. That’s why I earn myself headaches.