Set default country according to IP

[swaldman]

Title:
Set default country according to IP

Area:
Shop

Summary:
When making purchases in the shop, it would be nifty if your country could be defaulted to a best guess based on IP.

Description:
It would be a minor convenience feature, and might involve quite a lot of work/hassle/complexity... but I thought I'd throw it out there in case somebody says "oh, that'd be easy actually" :-)

Drawbacks: Slowdown as the lookup is done; don't know whether this would be significant. Maybe there are some situations in which people would be offended by an incorrect guess?

Poll #13460 Set default country according to IP

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
6 (13.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
23 (50.0%)

(I have no opinion)
16 (34.8%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[killing_rose]

I know several folks who set their default country as something other than the one they actually reside in, or they hide where they live completely. There are a variety of reasons for that--privacy, RP, a stalker they're avoiding, whatever.

The address tied to the form of payment might also not be yours--I've got others I know who aren't the ones who actually buy the points for dw usage, and thus were you to go off of the one whose address is on the payment, the address will be incorrect. (You specifically say IP geolocation, which shouldn't be impacted by this? But it's early and I'm exhausted.)

[swaldman]

Um, the suggestion was for the country in your address in the shop (ie for the payment) to be guessed at. I am not suggesting this for the location given in the account's profile.

The country in the shop must be the same as on your credit card, as otherwise you will not be able to pay, hence my confusion - it's information that you have to provide anyway, so all this would do is save you a click or two.

But unless there is actually misunderstanding here, I'm not trying to say "you are wrong to be creeped out by this" - and if lots of people are creeped out by it then we probably shouldn't do it - I'm just trying to understand the reasons.

[killing_rose]

...I still find geolocation creepy as all hells, but yes, you're correct, I misunderstood the suggestion.

[azurelunatic]

Current physical location and address location of payment method aren't necessarily congruent. Particularly if it's the address location associated with a prepaid card.

[swaldman]

True - although I imagine a different country is probably quite rare - but surely it's a good start? (if it's right for only half of people, that's still half of people who don't have to set their country, with no detriment to the rest)

[matgb]

Observation: It defaults to the US, over 90% of payments are from US based payment methods, if it starts detecting things, it's going to mean people currently not having to select will have to do so.

90%+ currently don't need to select their country, there's a chance your proposed change will make several of them start to have to do so, but we don't know how many.

[swaldman]

It defaults to blank, not to US.

Maybe that's a good argument to say that it *should* default to US, but it would probably annoy a lot of non-USians.

[matgb]

Ah, I'm misremembering then, in which case yeah, everyone has to select a country, if it selects the wrong country fixing it is easy.

OTOH, if it defaults to blank, people are forced to change it, if it's not blank people might not always check it's correct and errors happen, invalid cards, etc. No idea if that's a major concern-I'm going to vote for this as I think it's a good idea, but I can see there are problems with it, although some of the objections make less sense to me for above stated reasons.