Slashdot Mirror
Computer Sites that Accept International CCs?
neves asks: "I'm a student from Brazil writing this with my four year old pentium 233Mhz machine. Tired of suffering, I had decided to upgrade my machine when a golden oportunity appears: a friend of mine is comming from California to Rio de Janeiro and has offered to bring some components! Computer components in the third world are twice the price, and a generation behind ones available in the US, so now it is possible to buy an Athlon 900Mhz, an Abit motherboard and a good fan for less than US$500,00. You'd think I would just have to order what I need from a web store and have it sent to her address in California, but this hasn't been that easy. I've been trying for weeks to find a trusted store that will accept my International credit card! I've already used it to buy gifts and from Amazon to send to friends in the US (but Amazon doesn't sell motherboards). I need this information fast, as my friend's due to travel soon." I would think, with the Internet doing it's thing to erase regional barriers, that online merchants would be interested in accepting more than just "VISA, Master Card or American Express," however this seems to make this assumption invalid. So why is it that they aren't able to accept payments from International Customers?
As someone who works for a credit card processor, allow me to state that this issue is not a technical one, but rather a liability one. The credit card companies actually make it pretty easy to do international transactions, even currency convertion, as long as the settlement to the acquiring bank is in your native currency. (That is, a card from outside the US will be settled in dollars, and you'll be charged a slightly inflated convertion rate.)
However, when it comes to card-not-present transactions, and especially e-commerce transactions, merchant banks get nervous. You (and indirectly, your merchant bank) is shouldering the risk of fraud for any transactions that run through your account. The merchant banks usually respond to those that take out-of-country cards by jacking the discount rate up by a ridiculous amount. Whereas you might have been paying 2.5% before now you're paying 3% or 3.5%. And that's on ALL transactions! So even if you take one international card for every 100 transactions that you do, you're still getting charged the huge rate on ALL transactions.
Quite simply, the merchant looses money, unless they are getting a fairly substantial quantity of overseas orders. We do processing for many free software/open source related companies, and for them the US is just one small part of their customer base. But for your average hardware merchant...well, it just isn't worth it.