I’m writing this quick post while I’m waiting for a ‘Customer Support Advisor’ to try and resolve what is kind of a messed-up problem for an ecommerce platform to have.

I made the mistake of wanting to give EA (Electronic Arts) my money, by using their Origin platform to purchase a game on my PC. Seems like a regular enough occurrence, right? Literally why the Origin service exists, right? Give them the money through my computer, download the games onto my computer, bam. Steam manages to attain this base level of functionality (albeit sometimes very poorly, and with a bloated and dated UI/infrastructure), so EA must surely be able to do the most basic step in ecommerce and TAKE MY PAYMENT INFORMATION, yes?

Of course not. This post wouldn’t exist if they could. Also we’re talking about Electronic Arts here.

Oh! I’m being escalated to a Customer Support SPECIALIST. It’s gonna take a SPECIALIST to get to the bottom of this hum-dinger of a problem!

The problem being: EA does not know how to validate my credit card on their Origin platform.

So, literally the thing that this platform exists to do.

I mean, I’ve built more competent ecommerce websites/apps as a single person.

I’ll take some screenshots of the chat conversation that I’m having with the ‘Advisor’- OH HECK, they have a button where you can just save a PDF of the conversation? That’s… Actually useful. In this one particular circumstance. I’m shook.

Unnecessarily long and complicated story short, I ended up having to use my credit card through Paypal for Origin to accept my money. So I had to go through an unnecessary third party with my credit card info in order for Origin to do what it is literally designed to do. Wowzers.

EA is garbage.