I have been having the same issue. I have been in touch with apple support for the last 7 days (even provided them with screen recordings to assure them that i know how to pay for things online). I find the whole interaction with Apple Support to be extremely frustrating. Some of the questions i have had to endure - "what browsers have you tried? have you tried using safari, what version of safari? what mac os do you have? are you on wifi, do you have a firewall?" Just to debunk all their theories about all the things that I could be doing wrong to give them my money - I successfully bought an app on their app store using the same credit card! - the exact same credit card fails "authorization" when trying to pay for the dev license!I hope someone at Apple is reading this... and will commit to fixing this issue. Meanwhile if anyone has had a breakthrough kindly share.

Okay this saga continues. I FINALLY found a support advisor, who seems to actually listen (for a change) and be open to the possibility that there is something wrong on Apple's side. Thus far, everyone at apple has the attitude "there must be something wrong with what you are doing, because we are flawless and perfect". I sent them the receipt for the app i bought on the app store using the exact same credit card and billing details. So now, they are willing to take the fees via phone. This took more than 10 days + several emails + hours on the phone + tons of frustration to accomplish. It's a real shame that a trillion dollar company has such big customer service issues - what kills me is that i am trying to GIVE them money and they are making it SO HARD to do!

I have been trying to use my US credit card/debit card - to no avail. Still struggling with this one!