Important Message: Entered Phone Number Has Insufficient Characters

Amazing Amazon

 

Always been a big fan of Amazon. They have such a wide range of products and shopping online truly has never been easier. Also, they are a pioneer in the field and online stores like Flipkart that have struck it big have followed the Amazon model to their advantage - even beating them at their own game here. Indeed, Amazon doesn't have a very large presence in India - but then again, they have a wide range of goods to offer globally.

 No Indian Jenny on 867-5309

So, I was in the market for a pair of new running shoes since the ones I have need to be switched out. I've been very satisfied with the Saucony Guides and when I recently noticed that Amazon ships to India as part of their AmazonGlobal Saver promo, I was excited. I went ahead and ordered a pair of Saucony Guide 7s. When I was asked to input a shipping address during the checkout process, I filled in the details - including providing a valid phone number (+91 followed by 10 digits). However, after clicking on the "ship to this address" button, I received the following notification.

Annoying message that shows up when an item's shipping to India even if the number's valid

The interesting part is that no matter what I did, the message stayed. Adding digits, removing digits. Just nothing . Zilch. Nada. So, clearly this is frustrating since it prevents the person from shipping items to India. Well, almost...

Turns out that I had another address in India that I could ship to as well (and that had been saved earlier) - and selecting that caused no issues despite having the same phone number. How curious! Indeed even editing that address without changing the phone number displayed the same message.

Solutions

 

Customer's Queen (or King)

 

I was able to get the address I wanted to ship to by contacting Amazon customer service. 

I first reached out to them on Twitter and told them about this issue. I got the following link sent to me as a reply

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us?

On clicking it and after signing in, in the

1 What can we help you with?

field, I clicked on

Something else

Then in

2 Tell us more about your issue

I chose

Account settings --> Update shipping addresses

 Finally, in

3 How would you like to contact us?

I clicked on the 

Start Chatting 

button.

The person at the other end was helpful and they could input both the shipping address and telephone number just like I wanted them.

Wait - It's Eight!

 

Thanks very much to Faheem Mitha for sharing this solution: Another way around this conundrum is to input "91" followed by an 8-digit number. Like so

91XXXXXXXX

No dashes or plus sign at the beginning. I can second that this does the trick.

Unfortunately, land line numbers in India are not standardized so, not everyone has an 8-digit number they can input in this field. Some are shorter - and some are longer. Indeed mobile numbers across India are 10 digits. So, it stands to reason that Amazon update this page to allow for some more flexibility - perhaps after carefully looking at the different phone formats used in India.

What's Up, Amazon? Help!

So, what's going on, Amazon? Is this a silly bug that's been overlooked or is there more to this peculiarity? In either case and explanation would be super helpful. Thank you.