If you are lucky enough to have a Windows Phone device at some time in the future, you may receive an email with a subject line reading, IMPORTANT! Microsoft Account Update Required for Your Recent Purchase. Once you inspect the message body, you will likely notice a recent purchase in the Windows Market could not bill your expired credit card. The suggested solution is as follows:
To update your credit card information, sign in to zune.net and choose “My account” from the drop-down menu under your Zune Tag in the upper right, or go to zune.net/support for assistance.
If you have already resolved this issue, please disregard this notice and accept our thanks.
After getting my first notice, I made the needed changes to my account as suggested above. However several days later I got the same message. After verifying the new card was my default card, I got the message again. Needless to say I received the message again and this time, I tried to remove the expired card to which I got an error message on Zune.net stating the credit card could not be removed at this time, try again later.
After receiving the 19th message, I was beyond annoyed with Microsoft as there was no phone number to call to solve this issue. The worse part was that my Zune music subscription still billed properly, however I could no longer purchase apps on my Windows Phone. I decided it was time to call in the Windows Phone Expert and the solution was simple, but not exactly obvious.
- First find an app you want to purchase
- On the details screen click buy vs. try.
- On the buy screen tap Change payment method
- Select the proper credit card.
In my situation, my credit card was in fact set to my expired account. After making this change I stopped getting the bill collector emails from Microsoft and I was able to continue purchasing. The confusing aspect of this situation was having a Zune music subscription billing properly, yet app purchases failing. More importantly, the suggested solution provided in the email message did not help solve the problem.
This is an easily solved back-end issue that I would not expect from an organization like Microsoft. It is too easily solved since the notice is not coming from the device, but rather from the billing system, so it could be resolved easily. As Windows Phone continues to grow, this kind of issue MUST be resolved so that a non-technical user is not pushed off the platform by this inconsistency. This is what destroys an otherwise happy user.
