My Kickstarter campaign is blocking on the Amazon Payments tax interview process.

I’m about to launch a Kickstarter campaign, which means I need to complete the Amazon Payments online tax interview process (since Amazon is the only payment mechanism for Kickstarter), but I can’t because Amazon repeatedly gives me an extremely unhelpful error message early in the tax interview.

Here’s the screen video. First you see the problem happening in Firefox, then I switch over to Chromium and show it happening there too, then back to Firefox just to confirm. Note that Chromium says the interview process is only “10%” complete, whereas Firefox has it at “20%”. This is because earlier in Firefox I had finally made it past this error on an earlier step, and am now stuck at 20%; in Chromium, I couldn’t even get past that first step. Update: I later reproduced the problem repeatedly with Internet Explorer on Windows, at a nearby Kinkos, though that’s not captured in this video.

The error just says:

There was an error. You may retry by closing this box or abandon the interview to try again later.
[Abandon Interview]     [Close]

That’s it. Pretty informative, eh?

Anyone seen this problem before? I guess my next step is to go to a Kinkos and rent time on a Windows machine; a pity, but I’ve got to get this done, and reimplementing Kickstarter is (pardon the expression) a nonstarter. I realize it greatly simplifies their business to just offer one payment mechanism, but this is far from the first report of problems with Amazon Payments; I hope Kickstarter decides to diversify their payment mechanisms someday.

Update: The problem happened on the Windows machine at Kinkos too, in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I eventually found a workaround: I kept hitting “Abandon Interview”, then restarting from the beginning: it seemed to let me go one more step each time, though I had to do a lot of abandoning and restarting to finish the process. Urgk.

Notes: on my own machine, the software details are: Firefox / Iceweasel 10.0.10 running on Debian GNU/Linux; Chromium version 22.0.1229.94 Debian wheezy/sid (161065). I didn’t get the details from the Windows machine at Kinkos.

2 comments

  1. Same problem here. I contacted Amazon and was told they will look into it, and try to fix the issue. You may want to call as well. More attention it gets the quicker they will fix it.

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