For those of you having trouble with the Wii Shop Channel’s billing address field (and judging from my analytics there are a number of you) try this page from Nintendo’s website. It may be an issue with your county name. Note that this is only for US customers only. And no, I have no earthly idea why Nintendo gives a shit about your county either.

I love my Wii. I love my Wii’s Virtual Console. I do not, however, love my Wii Shop’s credit card entry field. In fact, I have thus far found it entirely impossible to order Wii points using a credit card.

My problem lies in the pesky “County” field. I live in Richmond, Virginia. Those of you familiar with Virginia will know that we have a somewhat peculiar situation regarding our cities. While we have counties to be certain, our larger cities are counties in and of themselves. While I am bordered by Chesterfield and Henrico counties I do not live in either of them. I live within Richmond city limits and thus my county is actually Richmond.

The Wii shop channel does not accept this as a viable county. I have tried every variation of our fair city’s name I have yet seen on a bill or other piece of official correspondence without luck. So, I turned to Nintendo’s customer support and received this reply:

On the screen where you enter your billing information, there’s a reference to a web page where you can enter your zip code and see the county that’s associated with the zip code. This will allow you to order the Wii points through your Wii system.

(12/17/06) Thanks to an email I received from a reader with the email “Ticolyle” I now know what web page the NoA rep was trying to point me to. Here is Nintendo’s City Help page. According to it I should be entering “RICHMOND (IND C” as my county. That’s right, I was supposed to know that I needed a single open parenthesis, the letters “IND” for independent, and a lone trailing “C” at the end. This is very intuitive NOT!

I haven’t yet been able to find said web page reference, but I did a few reverse zip code searches. None of their suggestions resulted in success. For the record, I have tried the following with no luck:

  • Richmond
  • City of Richmond
  • Richmond Independent City (or as much of it as I could fit)
  • Richmond (City)
  • Richmond City
  • RichmondCity

I have tried all of these with and without capitalization and without fail been given the six digit code that stands for incorrect address. I really can’t think of any other alternatives.

Yes, I can get in my car, drive to a store, and pick up a points card. But sometimes I’m not wearing pants and I aim to keep it that way, to say nothing of the time I could have spent playing delectable classic games. Internets! Help me out here!