Tips for paying online with Mercado Pago?

[jorisw]

As a foreigner, it's impossible to open a Mercado Pago account as they want you to scan your Argentine ID card.

However Mercado Pago is also the payment provider for online credit card payments.

I have tried all my cards:
- Mastercard credit
- Mastercard debit
- VISA credit
- VISA debit

... all of them fail to complete my purchases with a vague "failed because of security reasons" error.

Has anyone been able to pay for stuff online? Is there a secret to making this work?

I used to be able to enter 00000000 as DNI, they don't accept that anymore at Mercado Pago either.

 

[jantango]

You answered your own question in the first sentence.

 

[jorisw]

No, I did not. I went on to talk about credit card payments hosted by Mercado Pago. This used to work for me.

Just like my credit cards mostly work with physical in-store Mercado Pago handheld terminals.

 

[jantango]

You got away only once with using a fraudulent number for a DNI, and you don't understand why it won't work again.

 

[jorisw]

Please give room for someone with useful insights. There are options like Otro for ID numbers. Credit card payments AFAIK are not intended to be restricted to nationals. I'm asking who's recently been able to pay with credit cards on Mercado Pago hosted check out, and how.

 

[Tilda]

My parents couldn’t pay with credit card but they could pay with a debit card in store quite recently.

We could use their credit card on my mercado libre account though. I’ve got a DNI. It might have helped that we have the same surname. The website saved their credit card details so we could make the second purchase automatically. An absolute NoNo.

 

[jorisw]

Thanks. As it turns out, the same MC Debit card and info did work with a subsequent purchase at another website. So perhaps something about the nature of the purchase (a jazz ticket at Passline) was the issue.

For identification, I chose ID Otro (other) and put in my passport number with letters replaced by zeroes.

As far as the legitimacy of this input goes, Argentina has no reason to care about a foreigners actual ID when it comes to processing purchase data.

 

[Stephano]

Thanks. As it turns out, the same MC Debit card and info did work with a subsequent purchase at another website. So perhaps something about the nature of the purchase (a jazz ticket at Passline) was the issue.

For identification, I chose ID Otro (other) and put in my passport number with letters replaced by zeroes.

As far as the legitimacy of this input goes, Argentina has no reason to care about a foreigners actual ID when it comes to processing purchase data.

Happy to hear that, but don't get too comfortable. My experience is that electronic payment is always a crapshoot, and the fact that it went through once does not mean that it will work again. Plus you never know what a seller is going to accept: it could be MercadoPago, transferencia, debit card, credit card, cash or a combination. I always keep enough money in my wallet to pay cash when I go to a store, because you never know. Having a local debit card helps though, it's the foreign cards that are iffy.

 

[jorisw]

A crapshoot indeed — two days later the same original purchase went through just fine

 

[Rich One]

At Coto sometimes Foreign BoA CC wasn't accepted. Ask for a supervisor to enter the correct code for foreign cards. It does work.