Source
r/kobo•
AcyFactory

Kobo web store unable to change country for payment method

I'm looking into getting an e-reader and am leaning towards the Kobo Libra H2O. I'm located in the US, but as I read in Japanese and English, I decided to try buying a few cheap books from each country's store before I buy the reader itself to see if having books from different regions on the same account was a thing I could do. I started off in the Japanese store and managed to buy a manga no problem. I used my normal American debit card and entered my Tenso address as my billing address. The book is in my account just fine and I can access it on the kobo android app.

But now it seems I am forced in the Japanese store. I can browse the US store but when I go to check out, I'm redirected back the the JP store. If the book is available there as well, it let's me check out in yen, if not, it just empties my cart out.

I go to my account settings and the url is appended with profile?wslang=en-US, but once I click "payment methods" is becomes /jp/en/account/billing. The country drop down menu shows no options other than Japan.

As I mentioned, I'm in the US and am not using a VPN to make my location appear to be Japan.

So is this account just permanently linked to Japan now? I saw some other posts here and on other forums mentioning changing your country in the payment information settings, is Japan the exception to this or something?

Posted Apr 18, 2021, 7:16 AM UTC

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More_Coffee_Than_ManKobo Clara HD•

Where is Tenso? Is that in the US or Japan?

1
AcyFactoryOP•

Oh sorry I should have specified, it's Japan.

Tenso is a Japanese forwarding service that let's people outside of Japan purchase from stores that don't ship outside of Japan by providing them with a Japanese address to ship the package to, then when they get the package, they send it to your real home address.

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More_Coffee_Than_ManKobo Clara HD•

I think that's your problem.

IIRC, the Kobo site validates against the zip code of the billing address on your payment settings. So you said it was a US Debit Card, but if the billing address zip code is somewhere in Japan, Kobo thinks you live in Japan and will then geo-restrict you to their Japanese page.

Try replacing it with a US-based billing address (switch credit cards if you have to), and then save your payment preferences.

1
AcyFactoryOP•

https://i.imgur.com/obCUSBh.png The problem is I can't change my billing address. Even when I clear the payment information, I still only have the option of selecting Japan from the drop down menu.

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More_Coffee_Than_ManKobo Clara HD•

Huh. Can't say I've ever run into that before.

Will it let you save the form if you just put in a zip code and nothing else? I see the grayed out country option, so I guess we need to get the site to reassess the implicit location. I'm hoping that just filling in the zip and nothing else will then make it change the country back to the US and replace the "prefecture" field with a "state" field so that you can fill out the rest.

1
DassoBrother•

Did you ever get this fixed? I somehow ended up in the same situation. Sounds like support could merge my content to a new account but I'd have to create another account with a new email address, not sure I can be bothered at this point.

1
AcyFactoryOP•

I can't remember exactly what I did, but I did something like make a new account with a different login option, then used the account linking options to link my old account to the new one.

So that also involves making a new account too but I just made it by logging in with Google so making the new account wasn't too difficult.

Also I now can't go back to the JP store so instead now I just have a separate account that I use for JP books that I just have to remove the drm from if I want them on my ereader.

No idea why this is so complex with Japan specifically.

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DassoBrother•

Thanks. I ended up creating another account anyways since it seemed like my Kobo was especially confused. I think I'll just create a separate account for JPN only next time and remove DRM before sending to my device.

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AcyFactoryOP•

Yeah that seems to be best. Btw for some reason after all this creating a new account for the JP store was also huge hassle for some reason. Clearing my cookies and using a VPN still made the new account want to access the US store. I ended up having to use the kobo desktop app while connect to the Japan VPN to access the store for some reason. No idea why I suddenly couldn't from the browser store.

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