How to update billing address on Apple Pay

Hi Jeff,

Your analysis makes perfect sense— the message “update your billing address” must start with the merchant. But it’s being routed through ApplePay, and showing up on an ApplePay interface, to be solved through ApplePay interfaces that the user is looking at. This is just a level of complexity through all these interacting systems. So yeah, not ApplePay’s fault…it’s just cryptic in the context of ApplePay being the system to be ‘speaking’ this particular message.

It would be *way* to much to expect a message from the merchant, routed through ApplePay, along the lines of “A US billing address is required from us, <merchant name>, to complete this transaction.” But we can dream.😉

thanks again.

Just to clarify: I know how to change a billing address. That’s not the issue. The issue is why some piece of software somewhere is now claiming it is incorrect, when it in fact, it is not incorrect. And the credit card is still valid.

On line, using iPad and web browser (Safari)

Thanks Jeff, for these suggestions. Sad to say that I’ve only got one card on Apple Pay. I had already done these steps, except for the last one involving wallet. There I found a record of all transactions on this card, as I expected, all with a Canadian billing address for my Canadian credit card, and a U.S. shipping address, done over the past few months as I travel down here. I’m now hypothesizing that something might be flagged by some system somewhere, perhaps ‘not liking’ the length of time that payments done in the US are going to a Canadian billing address—through a third party platform like Apple Pay. The streaming service I pay through Apple Pay has suddenly stopped accepting payment through this same card on Apple Pay—perhaps detecting that I’m streaming (temporarily) from the US. I could test this hypothesis by trying a third merchant now through Apple Pay. (Again, this is all happening in the context of other successful transactions just completed a week ago).

Next thing I’ll try is removing and re-adding the card completely.

then, I’ll just stop shopping till I get back to Canada ;-)

thanks for trying.

Ok, this problem ended up being my fault. For the merchant I was just trying to buy from, they insist on a U.S. billing address for a U.S. credit card for US shipping. This detail was *not* on their shopping cart page — I only found this out by further poking around and following other links. So having ApplePay send me cryptic messages about updating a billing address was just a consequence of this particular merchant’s policy. Others had no problem with it.

The problem with the streaming service is that the streaming service severed its relationship with ApplePay, and I guess (?) I was notified about that at some point or perhaps everyone else knew this. I got generic notices from the service to update my payment method, and I just couldn’t understand why…since it had always been handled through ApplePay.

So only moral of this story — understanding cryptic messages from ApplePay—is to make sure that US merchants will ship to US addresses, given a Canadian billing address for a card entered into ApplePay

thanks again for your engagement with this.