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After my little rant about my frustrations with chapters.ca, I got an email from a social media person offering help with the gift card thing. Pleased, I gave her the number on the gift card, as well as the fact that PH had had it checked at the local Coles and the card was functioning and reading a full balance.
She sent that information to some other bloke who emailed me and said he had manually transferred the money onto my account online. I emailed him back thanking him and asked him why the card wasn’t reading.
Turns out it’s because only SOME of the numbers on the card were relevant.
For anyone else having this problem, you should ignore any numbers preceding the digits 604883 in the barcode. Any preceding numbers are irrelevant (they tell Chapters where someone bought the gift card, which apparently their website is not set up to do).
Good to know.
I have suggested that they leave instructions to this effect on their website, because the chance of someone intuiting that “604883″ is the place to start in a string of 30-odd digits is virtually nil.
Anyway, there’s a happy ending – once I had the online balance transferred for me, I only had to try and place the order three more times for it to actually go through (the first time was my fault – I forgot a coupon code and had to go back. The second time, when I had reviewed the order, and clicked “place order” it returned me to the beginning of the checkout process again. Third time was the charm).
Four of the five books should be winging their way here via Canada Post. The fifth is a used book and will take a little longer to ship.
Hurray!
Dear Chapters,
Your website is glitchy and badly set up, but I appreciate that your customer service is on the ball enough to find and respond to my complaints. I appreciate that. If they hadn’t done that, I likely would have given up and ordered the books from Amazon.Although I have to say, I hope your online process becomes much smoother in the future.
Carol
Well, that’s… good? They really need to fix that — I can’t imagine you’re the first person to ever be confused about it. Good on them for prompt customer service, though. Unlike another Canadian company who only send form emails to you and never actually address your problem. (Yes, I’m looking at *you*, Canadian Tire.) Grrrr.
Absolutely!
Ew. At least they tried when you publicly berated them? =P (They’re still better than KodakGallery! =)
GOD YES. Although I haven’t received my order yet, so maybe we’ll withhold judgment :p
Thank you I found this site while searching on google for a solution to this card problem after I entered my frigging chapters card number 20+ times and got a magnifying glass to see if I couldn’t see some of the numbers or something.
omitting those numbers worked.
Glad I was able to help another customer!
Yes…you save my sanity, too! They still don’t have anything to clue in a customer. Thank you!
Craziness!
Like the previous poster, I found your blog while Google searching for a solution to this problem too. Drove me bananas trying to arrange the numbers and checking them one by one to make sure I got them correct. So, thank you so much for the post. Ain’t it wonderful that Chapters’ website still isn’t updated since the time you wrote your post?
It’s baffling. I guess the important thing to them is that people buy the cards, not use them.
I also found this through Google while in a similar situation – thank you so much! I’ve ordered online plenty of times before and this has never been a problem. I thought I was going crazy!
Glad I could help
*Cheers* You solved my gift card problem. They really should put on their site that you have to leave those first numbers out.
I know, right? How long would that take? 3 seconds of coding. I suggested it to the customer support people, but clearly, nothing has been done.
It wouldn’t even require actual coding if they just appended some instructions to the text in their blasted “incorrect card number” message.
You have my sincerest gratitude for writing this blog article, as to the best of Google’s knowledge it’s the only place on the entire internet with a solution to the problem. I doff my hat (and my $25 in books) to you, good miss.
It baffles me that this problem still exists, a year later.
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Help me! Like the others, I found your post while Googling this problem. The only thing is that I’ve tried every freaking number on the card, and still haven’t had any luck! I’m at a loss as to what numbers to use since apparently, they’re ALL wrong -.- PLEASE HELP MEEEE D:
Unfortunately, this is the only fix I know. Tweet chapters and give them hell.