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Restrictive Sales Practices on the Web?
"Here are a few examples:
IBM, Apple and Dell operate web stores that sell almost their entire range of kit, they only ship to the USA. Power Notebooks have the same policy but cite different reasons (see below). Some manufacturers have local country websites but these offer a restricted range compared to the main site.
Apple has their new iTunes system. As I am outside the USA they will not let me logon to the system.
Amazon.com are willing to sell me books but nothing else.
The reasons for this policy range from the (almost) reasonable to the downright silly. Amazon cite difficulties with warranty returns as their reason and while most of the rest won't tell me why they don't want my business Power Notebooks told me that recent anti-terrorist legislation stops them from exporting equipment. Quite why they cannot export a notebook originally manufactured in the Far East is beyond me.
Getting the kit to me in Hungary is no problem either. FedEx and UPS have local offices and if that fails there is always the Hungarian Postal Service. Shipping time from the USA can be as short as two working days, I know this because my company obtains spares from the USA for our products."
Get off the web and learn how to paint. The countryside is beckoning.
I have been pwned because my
The US owns the world.. aparently.. Anything that sounds like it doesn't come from the USA scares us.
Paint.NET, a Free Image Editor, with Source Code Available!
It costs money and time and expertise to establish a world-wide shipping channel. You have to know a lot more about international trade law, and liabilities in cases of returns/exchanges/credits are much more complex.
Most small companies can't be bothered to grow that kind of capability, as the short-sighted shareholders (public or private) won't accept the large up-front cost in that kind of expansion.
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I don't know if it is a problem in Hungary, but some countries get blacklisted due to credit card fraud.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If US companies are too silly to ship to your country, why not start your own e-commerce site? Lease a warehouse in the US, have them ship to that, and then fly it over daily and fulfill your own orders...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I'd imagine that a lot of small companies don't want to deal with this sort of thing. Why a larger company wouldn't, I don't know.
AccountKiller
I have however heard that some places blacklist NZ credit cards for some reason. I haven't struck it, but there we go.
again, is this yet another example of the Internet and the rest of the world becoming more and more centered on the continental USA?
Um, considering the internet was started in the USA, and has since then spread to the world, I think the poster is backwards.
You do know that the US is where DARPAnet began, right? that little network that was the precursor of the internet?
Do you propose that companies that aren't prepared to undertake the expense and risk involved in doing business with every last country on the planet not be able to do business on the web?
I'm sorry but I don't see the basis for complaint in the original poster's musings. It costs MONEY to, for instance do business in Hungary, handle transactions and currancy conversions, and deal with fraud. If a particular market doesn't offer enough profit to justify the expense, that market simply isn't worth doing business with.
I'm a little suprised that Hungary is on the list of "not worth it", but perhaps that's not universal.
The web is planet wide. Not every company on the planet is obligated to do planet wide business to participate.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
The reason, as far as I can figure out - shipping costs, and paying appropriate taxes.
Even between the US and Canada, anything being shipped across the border gets taxes and a brokerage fee tacked on, and extra postage. Handling all of that for a wide range of countries, automatically, would be a logistical nightmare.
A simpler approach would be to set up a branch office in the target country and sell locally.
the itunes music server is a case in point. Until Europe gets on board with the Stationer's Cartel we call modern American copyright law, iTMS won't be selling jack to the EU.
He who pays the fiddler calls the tune.... It's all political and completely corrupt and deeply bound up with the factthat government exists to protect and project the intersts of the rich and powerful. Always has, always will. In our time, gummint protects and projects the interests of corporate cartels that are based in certain economic superstates, Oceania (USA/NAFTA), Eurasia (EU & Russia), and EastAsia (china/Japan). That's how it works.
The parent articles whinging about it is sad, as it indicates the depth of the problem...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If you're from Maine, surely you have friends/family still living in the US-- why don't you have them buy your shit and ship it to you, and you send them a check or something?
Sheesh!
So true !!
But wait, I can't buy Yopy 3700 Linux PDA in US.
(The Yopy 3700 is developed in South Korea and is currently available in France, Austria and the UK for a MSRP of $499 US.)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Now try looking at a similar sample of mail-order catalogs. Will they ship out of the US? (I have no idea) Also, did they simply use different excuses pre 9/11?
It may be that everyone is looking for an excuse not to ship because there is more profit margin/ less potential legal hassle in the local market.
iTunes is no surprise. Apple of late has only been negotiating about US distribution. Did you think that distribution laws and contracts could be set up in all countries simultaneously with no extra effort? IANAL, but even I know better. The five major labels cover many countries, but local laws differ. One country at a time.
Credit card clearinghouses charge more money to US companies for clearing international credit card transactions. Hence a lot of US retailers do not accept foreign credit cards for online orders.
...extend this list at will...
Fraud is more likely to occur on international shipments where the receiver is harder to track down.
Foreign people's credit information/scores are not easily available to US companies (this applies to financing options).
Music businesses may not yet have acquired the rights to distribute the music outside of the US. Local monopolies hamper global distribution.
There are issues with international shipping and customs. Customs may confiscate or return shipments. Export restrictions may prevent exporting certain technologies and goods.
--- Eat my sig.
What are you talking about? He's claiming that he's some websites wont let him purchase items from him, as they won't ship to Hungary. He then wonders what the point of allowing people to reach these sites is, if they only post to the states. I don't think he's stupid, like you are trying to point out.
Hungary is one of about ten countries worldwide that are responsible for a whopping 55% of credit card / bank / wire fraud. Serving the few legitimate customers in these ten countries often takes a back seat to preventing $3000 laptops from disappearing into the ether.
Sad but true. Even in the U.S., where our large cities are cesspools of scams and larcenies, the authorities have a better handle on the situation (mostly because the police forces here are rarely in cahoots with organized crime).
On second thought, I'm from Massachusetts... Ever since you became your own state, we just regard Maine as another country... or worse yet, part of Canadah. j/k
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
The chargeback levels from some countries are enormous. When a country accounts for only 2% of your business but makes up 20% of your chargeback, it doesn't take a business genius to decide that country's purchases aren't worth it.
If you live outside the USA, it is harder to get any G4 or 5 because of the 1994 law that makes computers capable of 1 gigaflops or more classified as supercomputers. This means that you are restricted in exporting them, because they are classified as munitions-grade, which is because of their code-cracking abilities. So don't try to bring a Powerbook on your next trip to China, or you risk being prosecuted for illicit cryptographic export.
Companies aren't required to sell you anything. If something is a pain in the ass and not very profitable, then they won't do it. Instead of wasting their time with the time consuming paperwork of customs, VAT, and tariffs, they can increase their margins more by spending their money on other things. Its a fact of life, and your bitching about it isn't going to help. Deal with it.
Your best bet is to look for a localized site so that it's not only easier for you to return the product but also save on postage.
So they should only put their website up on the USA Wide Web? I'd like to know how to access that.
If i find site that won't ship to me, i'll be unhappy, and maybe try to convince them otherwise, but i'm not going to demand that they leave and go make their own damn web.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Is anyone aware of any brokers who specialise in buying stuff from US web sites, shipping it to a US addess, then forwarding it to an international address?
No one in the US can find Hungary on a map.
I know, I know...what a crime it is that most places only ship to the US because that's where 99.8%* of the potential market that would actually buy the widget you want is, but instead of blaming websites for selling to their largest market, shouldn't you be complaining that there aren't enough Hungary-based web sites that well sell you stuff locally. ...How did this make the front page?
*Please note that 42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot, including mine.
Why are you visiting american websites? Aren't there any Hungarian internet stores to buy from? If not, opening one up could prove profitable.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It would probably be better to buy things from either European or Hungarian resellers. Instead of Amazon.com, use Amazon.co.uk. Instead of Dell.com, use Dell.hu IBM, again, use IBM.hu instead of IBM.com. Simple really.
I work for a webhosting company. We've had a couple instances where people have set up accounts via credit card, then we later were notified that the owners of the cards had no knowledge their cards were being used.
In each instance the cards and billing info were from overseas. None yet from within the US. I'm guessing that credit card fraud is a little more common in other coutries.
For us it's not a really big deal. We shut off the accounts and refund the money. However, if we were actually shipping a physical product I'm not sure we'd be as willing to deal with customers from overseas.
The EU just required that VAT taxes be paid on everything purchased on the Web, including from oversease, so I suspect that rather than go through all the war and whipass in dealing with the EU they just flip you off as a customer. So, call up Brussels and bitch! But don't expect anything to change, unless you expect it to get worse, then it will change.
Credit card companies are one of the major stop gaps to allowing truly online, global commerce from happening.
No major credit card company will validate a credit card from one country to the next. Hence, if I live in Canada, and want to purchase a product from a company in the UK, Visa (or Mastercard, Discover, American Express, etc) won't do a check on my credit card for the company in the UK to ensure that I'm the cardholder, that my address & postal code match, etc.
If credit card companies would allow cross-border validation to occur, online commerce would see an enormous increase in activity. Unfortunately, fraudulent purchases would be one of those increases, hence why the credit card companies won't budge. If there is a solution to the fraud issue (.NET? Liberty Alliance?), then convincing the credit card co's/banks/financial institutions to allow cross-border validation would be much easier...
IBM, Apple, and Dell probably have a channel for selling their products in Hungary, with agreements not to compete with those distributors. The distributors may not have a web presence, but that would be the Hungarian distributors' problem, not the manufacturers'.
I live overseas as well (Japan) and it's difficult getting things shipped directly. We have a PO Box in the US and things are forwarded to us. It's a little pricey but it works out well. This page has a list of companies that do package forwarding as a business. I don't use any of them, caveat emptor!
The web store I work for used to accept orders from any country. About a year ago we started getting lots of credit card fraud from foreign countries. Now we only accept orders from the US and Canada.
I don't think there are any restrictive sales practices being used over the web by vendors. US has had a head start over the other countries as far as setting up shops on the web is concerned. So, naturally one would see a lot more US centric stores on the web than say a country like Hungary. But then, its upto the other countries to get their acts together.
You say that the local country websites have limited range to offer. So, isn't that more of problem with those local manufacturers then?
I'm from India and I've generally had no problems with buying stuff over the web... though I haven't bought laptops yet.
EU taxes?
...need more, let me know. I've been around this tree over and over, for years now.
Hightened security on shipping?
Cost to verify overseas c'cards?
Cost of refused delivery?
Cost of RMAs?
Import duties?
English only packaging?
If you are willing to pay I'll buy you anything you want and send it to you. I've worked in exporting before so I kind of know the business. Nothing like an expert.. especially to your location.. but for a lil $ I'd be willing to figure it out. ;)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You know all those little laws that are all the rage today? Laws that will make putting chips into ink cartridges illegal, laws that make reverse engineering your own property illegal. And all those lawsuits, lawsuits demanding the record companies sell their music online, lawsuits telling MS it's not up to them whether to bundle a web-browser with their OS or not, lawsuits blaming McDonald's for your fat ass...
Add that shit up.
You can have it one way or the other. In a free market, they'll sell anything to anyone willing and able to pay for it. Put up all these hurdles, and you'll cause this sort of thing to happen. Do you think Apple doesn't want to sell music to the rest of the world? Do you think IBM, Dell, Amazon, etc, don't want to sell to you?
Well, I know that whenever I deal with buying stuff from another country (even the US, I'm Canadian, but it's not as bad as Europe) - dealing with freight, insurance, currency conversion, tax conversion, etc can be a nightmare. Slap on the weird new VAT (Value-Added-Tax) rules that Europe has recently applied to the internet, and doing business overseas is a real pain.
Don't take it as a directed insult, think of it more in the business sense:
They're not ignoring you, just not including you due to costs and hassle.
I am surprised at the hassle you have getting computer hardware such as laptops though. Do you have any friends/family that can receive the item and ship it over for you?
I live in India, so I can feel the OP's pain.
However, there are a number of problems due to which a company would be reluctant to ship to any random country:
1) Local laws: the laws in each country could be different. Its too much work to figure out whether you are satisfying all the local laws, before you can ship there.
2) Fraud: as someone else pointed out above, chances of credit card fraud are much higher.
Here in India, we don't really have anything akin to the US social security number (nothing that works, anyway). So lots of people just stop paying bills (credit card, cell-phone, personal loan) before they move to a different city. And there's not much that can be done about it.
If this is a problem a local company faces, imagine what would happen to a company that doesn't even have an office here.
3) Lost in the mail: Often, items shipped internationally get lost somewhere en-route and never reach the recipient. If it is not stolen or damaged along the way, it might get stuck in customs clearance. Sending it through a reliable channel like Fedex cost a godawful lot of money.
And often, customers are going to blame the company if the goods don't reach.
4) Lack of interest: with all the above problems, it is rare that there is an item that is not available locally and easily, but at the same time is popular enough to justify going through all the trouble.
navin.
One of the many reasons is that it would cut into their overseas offices' profits.
Example: The Creative Nomad Zen costs US$299, and even after shipping, customs handling and local tax, I could ship it here for around AU$500. Yet locally, the RRP is ~AU$850 - if I was Creative Australia, I'd be asking head office to stop letting such things get shipped to my 'zone'.
Palm had an arrangement like this for a while, but weren't too strict on enforcing it, and I know Garmin had big restrictions on the sale of their GPS units, which people very vocally complained about.
As I said, this is just one reason of many, but it's the one I've heard most often.
Won't they sell you anything? I can't read Hungarian so I can't tell.
As far as everyone else is concerned, when there is enough profit in selling to people like you (people from Maine living in Hungary who want products from American online stores), it will happen. WWW is just a name; on-line stores have no obligation to be global. It's frustrating (I lived for a year in China and understand what it's like not to be able to get very simple things that make your life a lot easier but for some reason can't be found), but it's going to be a matter of some more time.
maybe also because of price differences? - I don't speak for hungary, but the below situation is my understanding of some tricky thing that goes on between danmark and germany:
danmark has 25% VAT, and germany 13% (VAT = sales tax); to equalize final prices, car manufactures price the cars so that the final price (after the VAT) is about the same in both countries.
a lot of germans used to go over to danmark, buy a car, go back to germany (get a refund on that 25% on the way out of danmark) and pay the VAT for germany. pocket a good chunck of change.
manufactures were not happy about it, so that changed in a zippy (lobbied some legislation, IIRC).
so, for example apple products are 30% more expensive in japan than the US. I can't imagine them being happy about me shipping a powerbook over here.
on the other hand, amazon japan seem to be all for shipping things to the US, though - any maybe to other countries like hungary too; so maybe give them a try.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I have extensive experience with the Hungarian Post. I would NEVER send anything of value through it. The postal workers are so poorly paid and overworked that some supplement their meager incomes with "lost packages". Last Christmas, our entire shipment to Aunt Zsuzsi was lost this way. I no longer complain about the quality of the U.S. Postal never. I now realize how good it is compared to most of the rest of the world.
BTW, what district do you live in, or are you outside of Budapest?
-- Will program for bandwidth
Do you think that if you were to try calling up Sears and ordering from their catalog they'd ship to Hungary? Do you think major Hungarian web-merchants would ship to the USA?
I doubt it.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Does that mean these sites should post a disclaimer listing the countries they don't ship to...oh, wait...
U.S. SALES ONLY
The Apple Store sells and ships products only within the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. No shipments can be made to APO or FPO addresses, United States territories, or addresses outside the United States. You may not export any products purchased at the Apple Store.
But I'll continue in English.
I have very suprised to learn that export restrictions still apply, considering that Hungary has been a member of NATO for a number of years (and will be an EU member in one year). When I first lived there (1988), things were different, and we simply avoided silly US export restrictions by buying from Taiwan.
My guess is that Hungary simply isn't a large enough market for many on-line retailers to find it worth while to make the proper arrangements for Hungarian customs. Once Hungary is part of the EU, that problem will go away.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Yes, these minute companies with their pitiful earnings and small employee lists.
He wasn't only talking about shipping, he was talking about companies that offer services over the web as well.
Yay me!
Why does it mean that just because a site is on the web it must provide all its services to the entire world? The web is worldwide, not the services of each specific site.
That's like complaining that the front page of the New York Times on the web isn't world-centric (hint: it's not even US-centric, it focuses on New York)
Having been in a small mail order business for quite a while, I can tell you why US companies hate shipping internationally:
It's a pain in the ass.
An international package takes at least 3 times the paperwork to fulfill. There's a 4-part customs form, customs declarations, and not to mention ungodly postage. It also screws up shipping calculations. In the US, you can safely charge a flat rate fee for shipping and that's that. You can even run actual shipping rates through the current USPS And FedEx rate tables. Now, bump it up to international shipping. You HAVE To insure everything that goes international, since the package is handed off between organizations many times if you use the US Post Office. UPS and FedEx are ungodly expensive internationally and hardly pay to use. Not to mention that many international customers don't have English as their first language making correspondance that much more difficult.
Now what about your return policy? I sure as hell don't want to be sending a call tag for $100 to get a computer shipped back to me because they didn't like it and it's broken. It's just impossible to provide the same level of customer service to someone not in the same country as you.
So if you were wondering, that's why US Companies hate shipping abroad. Canada and Mexico are a little easier since they have more relaxed borders, but still a pain in the butt.
At one point the level of chargebacks almost drove me out of business. Imaging you selling so many copies and then a month or so later almost all of them get charged back!!
It leaves a pretty bad taste in the mouth.
Now, my friends and family in Jamaica will ask me to purchase stuff for them and ship it. I am glad to do it. The submitter better find some friends here that can do it for her/him.
Until the day comes around when the laws and financial instutions play catch up in those countries, we will always be reluctant to do business overseas.
Newsfollow.com
Department of Homeland Security Chief Patriot Tom Ridge just announced a new push aimed at thwarting economic aid to you-know-who. This glorious new program will result in all financial transactions being monitored and recorded and archived forever. In this way credit card fraud will be stopped. In fact, it's going to be called the War On Credit Card Fraud And Money Laundering. Once appropriate policies are in place in the U.S., other nations of the world will also adopt the same standards. Or else. Recent action by the OECD and the FATF in blacklisting offshore tax havens was just the opening salvo in the War.
So, be Happy! Soon, thanks to the efforts of the patriots at the Department of Homeland Security, the entire WORLD-Wide-Web will be safe for you to reliably conduct credit card transactions. More importantly, it will be safe for merchants to collect their payments and banks to earn their interest. (You didn't really think anyone cared about you, did you?)
The Apple web store at apple.com ships to the US, the Apple web store at apple.ca ships to Canada, the Apple web store at apple.co.jp ships to Japan... and so on...
You also can't buy a lot of other things in the USA. Granted, some of them I do not ever want.
If National Geographic found that 90% of Americans can't find it on a map, then it's a statistic. Not a stereotype. A stereotype is when you assume things about an INDIVIDUAL based on observations OR commonly repeated false statements based on the GROUP that they are from. Judging an individual based upon your perception of the group and not on his own merit is acting upon a stereotype.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Fortunately, a few local companies (it's been mostly airlines here) have realized this is good business and so have created the service for anyone to use. You pay with your card, set the shipping address to some US P.O. box they give you (usually in Miami) and once it gets there (transparently for the vendor) they take care of getting it to your house, charging you for all the taxes involved, checking all relevant regulations, etc (obviously you pay a little more for the service but There Ain't No Such Thing As Free Shipping). This is extremely understandable and is, I believe, the way to go (except for the LARGEST companies - I'm sure, say, Amazon could afford to ship here).
(What DOES remain a problem is when they definitely do NOT take any sort of international credit cards. I mean, you HAVE to pay some way! Hello, this is not a fraudulent country!)
And you remember that little thing called the www invented at CERN? The idea was to have a simple, human readable and specified interface that was manchine and nationality independent so that everyone in the world could use it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Fraud from that area of the world is very bad
if you defraud them here they can make life miserable for you
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
It just isn't cost effective.
Processing foreign credit card transactions costs 2-7% more. Chargeback rates for overseas transactions, particularly to Eastern Europe and Asia are 400-1000% higher.
Additionally, plenty of countries have product liability and merchantability laws that vary greatly from the United States. It just isn't worth hiring international lawyers to sell some books or a pc.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Don't blame Apple for this one (even if you aren't, sorry). Apple wants to expand overseas with its music service, but at the moment, the big 5 record labels either aren't interested or won't do it for some More Ominous Reason(tm) like distribution control fears or something else stupid. :-/
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Believe it or not there actually are differences between the differnt countries in the world. Companies that don't sell to a foreign market usually do so because they have either found it to be more costly than profitable or they haven't found a reason to expand into that market. Comapnies are usually trying to make money and if it costs more to setup your company to do business in some foreign company then more than likely you aren't going to. Its not as simple as just telling UPS to ship to some country. There are lots of hurdles to doing business in a foreign country. Logistically, financially, and legally. And if anything the amount of small business transactions has improved tremendously. 10 years ago the average consumer wouldn't have bought a damn thing from some other country, even with mail order. The fact that we dont have universal commerce between all countries shouldn't surprise anyone.
"The final irony? I'm originally from Maine. These folk won't even sell to one of their own!"
Is this actually irony?
Why not just ship it to someone you know in the states, and then have them ship it to you.
It would seem that this is the obvious choice, but thats just me...
From a ProCooling thread about some cheap, good surplus pumps:
As I told before, I ordered two of these Johnson pumps at Surplus Center.
They were shipped on June, 6th.
Yesterday [June 28th] I received this mail:
Quote
Chris,
Today the Post Office returned your package to us. We aren't sure why, there was plenty of postage. We are going to reship it, I just wanted to make you aware of the possible delay.
Sincerely,
Vanessa Knuth
Surplus Center, Lincoln, NE
End quote
So my pumps came to Belgium and for an unknown reason were sent back to the states...
credit card fraud. Tons and tons of credit card fraud in smaller european countries. Companies have gotten tired of trying to combat it so in some cases, they just don't accept certain orders which may seem questionable.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
In other words, if I order a $15 Tee-Shirt from ABC Company, and it arrives at the border, and I get a notice that I owe some conglomerate brokerage firm an additional 20 bux for taxes & brokerage fees, and I refuse the shipment (and the fee), whether or not the product gets returned to ABC Company, they still get to keep their $15 !!!
Not a bad deal at all for ABC Company, especially if they get the product back, ready for resale!
As for international shipping, don't the major shipping companies have readily-available online shipping calculators? I'm sure they do.
~TeFl0n aka Dos4who?
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
I used to buy a lot of software (mostly games) from the US and Canada. The local versions are all in Japanese, or the manual is in Japanese. Recently however, in the last 2 years or so, the companies I used to purchase from have refused to sell to me as I am in Japan. I can buy books, CDs, DVDs, but not software. The policies surrounding this is by no means consistant either, some places simply refuse, others will sell to me if I fax a photocopy of both the back and front of my credit card and a recent credit card statement (yeah right). I could simply (and beleive me it is simple) get an unauthorised copy, but I actually want to give the developers money for their product.
Some of this is probably due to trade restrictions, but I can see little difference between selling a DVD and selling software, though they are probably handled by seperate trade laws and agreements.
I used to live on the Canadian side of the US/Canada border and it was hard work ordering American things. A lot of places wouldn't accept a Canadian billing address so you had to call your credit card company and register your shipping desitination (in our case, a warehouse in Michigan) as a billing address. It didn't make much sense but whatever, it worked for a lot of places.
The worst though was Dell, they have those refurbished laptops on their US site that are actually a really good deal but in Canada the best refurbished notebook is from 2 years ago. They also didn't carry as many product lines for new stuff as the dell.com site.
Why even bother having a Canadian division if they're going to be so inferior? Wouldn't it be better and cheaper just to have a small pack of logistics people and lawyers working in the US to ship stuff to Canada?
I would have been perfectly happy to have given Dell a large sum of money for one of their products but ended up going somewhere else. Dell.ca sucks!
Incidentally, if you work sales support at one of these USian companies, don't suggest to me that I have an American friend order it for me. I don't care to know anyone in northern Michigan and even if I did, I doubt they would be willing to let me put several thousand dollars on their credit card.
This law long has been REPEALED for quite some time.
We don't accept "Father O'Day" posts, so I see no reason why we should accept blatant Mac propaganda.
A lot of the response posts are centering on reasons as to why companies would not ship to other countries at all. However, this person has stated that many companies have localized (country-centric) sites, however, these sites only have a partial catalog when compared to the US version of the website. Why is that? What is stopping, say, Dell from selling Model A, B, and C in Hungary rather than just Model A and C.
Along the same lines.... why is it that Amazon will ship this person books, but nothing else? I can see region coded DVD's, but not CD's, or consumer electronics?
In this day and age, if a country is willing to ship some products overseas, there really isn't a reason why they can't ship all of them. They've already got the infastructure in place, yet they aren't fully using it.
Do Europeans know where the fifty states are? By god, they don't make Europeans remember the names and capitals of the States? Well, they do teach both that AND european countries in geography in middle school in the US.
Since there's no reason to think about other countries, the only time we give Europe a thought is when we are at war and a country's map is on the TV (totally serious.) There is absolutely no reason for us to ever give one thought about Europe.
The only countries I suspect an average American knows is USSR/Russia, France, Italy, and England. And Australia, I suppose. And for good reason. There is not one good thing from knowing where a European country is if one doesn't care.
Fact is, Europe can't hold a stick to the opportunities an educated person has in the US. Europeans would snob at many business owners' attempts unless they fit the look of their country. But here, all diverse groups are putting their heads together and there is virtually no discrimination like an Irish person being in England, I suppose.
Europe's time has passed. The 'in' thing is the United States. Only dumb asses would avoid the U.S.. Granted, if you come from a long family history and you have inherited shit loads of land from the 1400's and go skiing every day in your European country, then maybe that's good for you. But for the majority of people, almost everybody who isn't held back by commitments to their current country, the best choice is the United States.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
This might be an opportunity for a someone in the US to handle shipping for people outside the US. They could also proxy returns, if they felt adventurous. Sure, they'd be exposing themselves to the aforementioned fraud, but if the business plan was well designed, there could be profit.
:).
That just leaves services like iTunes. I'm sure Apple would not take too kindly to that service being proxied. But what's the harm in a merchandise proxy service? Not that I'm too interested in getting into that. Sounds too complicated for me (read: I'm just the idea man
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
http://www.myus.com
Sig: BEEeeeP,,Please press pound, so I can get on with my fucking life!
damage, warranty (shipping costs and you have some chances that the product is damaged during transport)
international transactions taxes and costs (it is basically like converting money into another currency, you'll have to pay the banks for this operation even if it is virtual money, not real bills, one side is still paying using another currency)
increased costs for support (hotline, manuals, ...)
laws, you will have to ensure that your product is legal in other countries, it may sound easy but that may be difficult for products as children-related products, software which use encryption, ...
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
... and it's still a major pain.
I tried to buy a Casio watch from a store on Yahoo - it had tide data and barometric pressure (useful for boating) - no US credit card, and no sale.
I bought some 3Ware 7500-4 RAID-5 cards for my company from the US, and I had to fax a form in with my signature because the credit card was Canadian.
I think it's the anti-fraud restrictions placed by credit card companies; sell something over the Internet, and the risk goes up if the laws of your country can't be used to track down a stolen credit card.
Hungary is currently a candidate for entry into the European Union. If it is accepted it will reduce the barriers of entry of American firms in your country. It is then that you will be able to take advantage of the American and European segments of the Internet.
I work for two small web only retailers and know the business practices and policies. International shipments are a pain in the ass. And this goes for receiving shipments (large bulk orders) into the US and shipping from the US to the end customers. For the Importing into the US, the main problem is documentation. You have to file so many damned forms it is ridicules. Right now, the shipper of our products forgot some form, and customs told us to get some form from the manufacturer, who is the only one who can create it, and give it to the customs office or they will DESTROY yes destroy $20k worth of products. Now that is our cost, retail is 5 times that. As for sending customers items.... FRAUD Everyone gets this one. Of all the fraud we run across, most of it is from outside the US CA and UK. Of course we get it from inside the US too, but most are outside. Credit Card Companies rules on fraud We have US customers who call their CC company after they get their items, tell them they didn't order the stuff, or say they sent it back, then the CC take their money back. We are out products, CC service fees, and shipping. We can fight this type of fraud inside the US, not outside. Cost of shipping It is damned expensive for packages over one pound. Time It takes minimally twice as long to ship an international package vs. a domestic. Some take longer depending on the items being shipped. Some require extra paperwork, some items can't be imported at all. With all that being said, we still take most international orders. But we usually do a manual verification of the credit card with the CC processor. Which takes time. But some we just refund outright and don't contact the customer. Like UPS Express Expedited (More or less next day) for a $5 item, and shipping is $200, and going to Indonesia. Not likely a good order. We have added some extra steps to get international orders out just to try and make people happy. But they are only a small percentage of our daily orders. Problems with international packages take much more time and money to get resolved than US orders.
Fear Is the Only God
Having lived overseas for many years, I can sympathize. However, that doesn't mean I stood for it. Get off your asses and make a difference rather waiting for someone else to do it.
June 23, 2003. WWDC. Real-world app demonstrations. Dual 2.0GHz G5 dusts dual 3.06GHz Xeon. Makers of the third-party apps used in the tests stand by the results.
Apple Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz): $3000
Dell PWS 450 (dual 3.06GHz): $3679*
* Dell PWS 450 with single 3.06GHz Xeon, base price $2074, with options added/changed to match the G5's configuration, which included:
-adding a second 3.06GHz Xeon processor (+$999)
-upgrading RAM to 512MB (+$119)
-upgrading to the cheapest drive that could write DVDs (+$249)
-upgrading to the largest IDE drive available (still 40GB smaller than the G5's) (+$140)
-adding a modem (+$49)
-adding a FireWire card (+$49)
Don't believe the numbers? Go to Dell's site and configure it yourself. The Mac is cheaper and faster than the cheapest Dell model that can handle dual CPUs.
Now, repeat after me: "GHz doesn't mean shit across two different architectures... GHz doesn't mean shit across two different architectures... GHz doesn't mean shit across two different architectures... "
I once stumbled across a web site that sold some rather rare Star Trek fan products. They were rather cheap, some pins or something like that, I don't recall the details. Anyway, the items cost a few dollars and I thought I can easily afford to pay it.
The website and the company were located in the USA. Well, no problem, they can send mail from USA to Finland, where I live. Indeed, they could do that, but once I received the items, I faced a rather nice surprise. The items, that could fit to one letter, cost more than $20 to ship while it still took about six weeks in delivery.
While it might feel like a small world when you can reach a website anywhere in the world in less than a second, the physical distances are still big and transportation costs money. Bits are cheap to transfer but physical items aren't.
How would you propose that the "post" their website to just the US?
First off, it's hard to export anything with good encryption. I seem to recall a product that we shipped with an old version of IE because it had weak encryption and anything newer would add a mess of export legal issues. Well, nowadays some systems, like IBM's, have chips in them that handle encryption, so I have to imagine that there are several issues with that in addition to the processing power that someone else mentioned.
Then there are issues with translation/foreign equipment. Generally, you want to sell a product in the language of the land that works with the hardware of the land, and it doesn't make sense to go through all of the legal processing for export licensing if it's not. This is not a cheap, fast, nor easy process.
For software, even for a relatively small product, translation, re-testing, installation changes, and bug fixes to work with all major languages seems to take at least six months in my experience, if not more. And yes, there will be bugs - maybe everything's MBCS and someone forgot to cast a string or check whether a character was one byte or two.. or some assumption was made based on a string. And foreign hardware opens up a whole other can of worms. Ever seen a japanese keyboard?!
And I'll leave off with one more - locally popular modules. Say your product uses a great speech engine, but it's English based. Now you need it for a product in Japanese, but the engine you used couldn't do Japanese well so it couldn't compete in Japan. So to sell your product there, you now have to make your code play nice with a new speech engine, and perhaps an entirely different set of capabilities.
You are not likely the common consumer in the region.
I doubt it will help us, Canadians, to shop music on iTunes.
Less is more !
A lot of people seem to think that selling internationally involves shipping a product and accepting a payment. It's not that simple. Every country has customs inspectors who are charged with making sure that whatever is shipped inot the country is legal and has appropriate tarrifs paid. So you have to have an import license to ship some kinds of things. And then there's the tax issue. If I sell something in Germany, I own the German government a VAT. (17% as I recall.) So you have to be prepared to deal with that. Most companies export their products to local sales subsidiaries at a transfer price, which substantially lowers the tax consequences and moves the profit from the US to the foreign operation. Yada Yada Yada.
Selling internationally and meeting the legal requirements of both the selling and receiving countries is not easy.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
because of high hacker risk certain countries are restricted at certain secure payment providers.
For every problem, there is a single answer which is simple, direct, and of course, completely wrong. This is it.
The answer is to get a company that will act as a broker (aka wrapper aka condom) for you. They are in the US and they complete the transaction. That company abstract your strange and foreigness and allows you to interract with regular American companies who have no idea how to deal with overseas sales, or simply refuse to.
Of course, anyone starting such a company would have plenty of risks, and it really see problems in trying to scale it up. But it certainly would be useful.
I used to work at a small company that shipped products overseas. Over 95% of credit card fraud cases were from overseas accounts. If they weren't fraud? The customers could still process a chargeback on the credit card account that immediatly removes the funds from the store's account. It's VERY difficult to prove shipment to the credit card companys when not using UPS. When we did use UPS, the charges are too large and the tarifs were unpredictable. We probably saved thousands a month after we decided not to ship overseas, once you factor in the chargebacks and time. It's unfortunate, but true.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I thought Canada must have transparent copyright laws with USA. No?
Less is more !
If you read the rest of the story, you would have seen:
Some manufacturers have local country websites but these offer a restricted range compared to the main site.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
And the other one is Nigeria?
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
You're probably a terrorist ;-)
In all actuality, dealing with customs is a huge problem. They may not accept it and send it back, charge extra duties, and other good stuff like that. A lot of country's customs services are much more finnacky than you'd expect.
It's also harder to track down credit card fraud in some countries. Let's face it, these places are in business to make money. If they think they're not going to get it, than they won't seel it to you. I'm not saying I support it, but having worked with online merchants, it's a big concern of theirs.
Dealing with international funds is also an issue. Some banks have problems with taking international payments. The vast majority don't now, but I'm sure some still have a problem with it.
I spent a couple weeks there backpacking around Europe, and it was by far the best experience I had. The country is just beautiful to begin with, but then you top that with the people (who are not only beautiful, but very friendly) and the history (Some amazing monuments, etc.) and you'll be hard pressed to find a country that compares to it.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
I know the problem first hand as both a buyer and a seller.
As already mentioned seller are worried about fraud as is it's the seller who wears the cost. I run a small computer company part time and I don't export out of New Zealand unless the customer will pay via TT. I have had several people ask me to export high value items overseas and pay by credit card but not get back to us when ask to pay by TT. We had a great time playing with one thief by trying to get him to pay shipping up front. If you want a good laugh read http://www.mavericks.co.nz/Scammer.html for the full email exchange.
With that background I recently tried to purchase a Zaurus SL-5600 out of the US as you can't buy them here. It took a lot of searching but I found a couple of companies who would export them but in one case the ship was going to be $150 on a $450 purchase ! Many will sell to foreigners if it is shipped to a US address. In the end that's what I did and I purchased it from www.thinkgeek.com and I am going to get a co-worker to pick it up from our US office later this month. I came very close to giving up because of all the companies that wouldn't deal with me. It was so bad I almost brought a PocketPC again. Now the problem is waiting a few weeks to get my new toy.
but everything else is not. Since you can't get a Dell computer from the WEB, it's not something you can download, the rules of meatspace kick in. Dell must arrange shipping, provide warranty, and ensure that you can't reverse the charges and keep the computer, among other things. What are your local liability and consumer protection laws? It costs them money to hire lawyers who know, and, if a certain fraction of customers will sue or otherwise make trouble, they may have to litigate in your jurisdiction. Is the market big enough for them to go through these troubles? Apparently not.
Many places which sell downloadable stuff don't even care where you live, if you send them money by paypal they will email you the file to whatever address is registered with paypal.
(iTunes could be truly world-wide, blame the labels on this one).
This is a little off topic considering that Hungary is not an EU member nation and the poster doesn't want to buy digital goods; however...
July 1st all companies selling digital media to member countries of the EU were required to collect VAT on that product (at the "general" VAT rate for that country which can be as high as 25%) and send it into that countries government. And it has always been that any company selling to EU member nations with a larger that $96,000 in sales per year (that number could be wrong) are required to collect VAT on the products they sell.
This has caused a lot of companies to stop selling in the EU because technically VAT is not an added tax like sales tax and therefore if something costs $400 in the US and you have a 10% sales tax the consumer pays $440 and the government gets $40; however if a product sells for $400 and the VAT is 25%, the consumer pays $400 and the government gets $100. The final seller pays the VAT on the entire product value, but then gets VAT refunds from the supply chain.
For more elequently written information check out:
European Union Value Added Tax - VAT
July 1 is VAT Day
But I think you've hit on something that is much deeper. Many times Americans will say "So what? Who cares about country X?" (See reply at same level) but as an American who has lived overseas most of my life, I have to say that it has helped a lot. It helps you understand where everyone else is coming from, especially in regards to their view of the US. It's similar to finding out who your neighbours are down the street. It may seem trivial, but it will help you understand your neighbourhood better and also understand what they think of you (and if you're a different race, what they think in general). Knowledge is always a good thing, and once we start to understand where people are coming from, we are better equipped to communicate and create solutions instead of blunders.
/soapbox
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Personally, I see the different laws in different countries as a great opportunity for business people around the world. In the US, the web market is already saturated, but there is a great demand in other nations that target their specific needs.
The US web market is saturated. the US only has a small portion of the world's population and there are many portions of the world that are growing faster than the US. The most lucrative opportunity right now on the net is for non-US companies that are targetting their local markets.
The fact that there are different nations on the planet with different languages, customs and laws enriches the net. It means that there is more than one mega market controlled by Amazon and Wal*Mart.
What are the top 10 countries with the most fraud? Can't seem to find a list on Google. Thanks.
How many posts have I seen on /. bitching about how people can't get their hands on the latest games/PlayStation/laptop/gadget/whatever from Japan?
How many people in this article are defending business practices that prevent people outside the US from ordering from US companies?
Do I smell the scent of hypocrisy? Naaah...
When I occasionally see something I want on ebay, the seller has usually listed it 'US Only' or just as bad, seems to have found the most expensive possible means of shipping.
:(
Being a poor student who lives in New Zealand, I just send a note to the seller asking if they'd be willing to sell to me, but most importantly, including details of USPS's Global Priority Mail - Flat-rate Envelope (large) which is US$9, and asking if they'd be willing to send the item (usually books) in that, and that I'll be paying by Paypal (maybe not the best, but the most accepted).
Most sellers are just worried about the hassle of shipping, and making sure they get paid. If I make it easy for them, most people have no problem.
Of course, getting a company to do so is a whole different ball game.
---- I've fallen, and I can't get up.
Although you can go to the local stores (e.g. apple.hu) they're not always quite the same. For example, apple.hu won't sell you a PowerMac and asks $5000 for a base 17" PowerBook. Of course, you can take a walk downtown and pick up a nice shiny new Mac at your choice of several local stores... Don't know what the prices would be like though.
It's because the world wide fraud rates are obscene. You might be a nice guy, but when we see 49 of 50 orders a day from Hungary on stolen credit cards, guess what we're going to do?
Getting law enforcement cooperation from Europe is impossible - it's bad enough trying to get any here!
Yes, I speak from experience on 'the other side'.
It's WORLD wide web, but it's not WORLD wide we have to do business with you and your fraudulent neigbors.
While air travelers can bring SARS with them halfway around the globe in hours, they can't bring their Dell laptop. Not legally anyway - Dell customers have a contractual obligation not to do so.
I don't know if that's still the case, but it was when I decided against purchasing a Dell so I could work during a long trip to Canada. I lived in California at the time.
Compaq, on the other hand, will not service a U.S. purchased unit outside the U.S. I was very happy doing my development on my Compaq Presario 1800T while living in Newfoundland the year of my wedding, but the unit failed and I had to send it back for service.
Good thing I had a recent backup.
First, Compaq Canada wouldn't service it because, although Compaq sells Presarios in Canada, they didn't sell that model. They connected me to the U.S. support center.
The U.S. support center wouldn't accept shipment from Canada, not even if I paid the shipping. There was no question of them expediting me a shipping container and getting it picked up after I packed my laptop. They simply said it had to be shipped from within the U.S.
Newfoundland is a long way from anywhere in the U.S. While it is geographically considered part of North America, it is actually an island separated from the mainland by a seven-hour ferry ride. Air travel to the U.S. from Newfoundland is quite expensive.
What I did was ask my client very nicely to FedEx me a check, paying me in advance for work I hadn't done yet, then I bought a brand-new Pentium III box from a screwdriver shop in St. John's. I restored my backup onto it and continued work until my next trip to the U.S., several months later.
I finally brought my dead Compaq to my parents' when I visited them for thanksgiving, in the U.S. Only then would Compaq agree to repair my laptop. But I had to fly back to Canada before Compaq returned it. They wouldn't return it to Canada either - they sent it to my parents' house. Then I had to ask my mom to FedEx me the laptop. FedExing a laptop is expensive.
The icing on the cake was that although Compaq had agreed to do a warranty repair, they said I voided my warranty by installing Windows NT, BeOS and Linux on it - the Presario came with Win98. They charged me $400 for a new motherboard.
They did so just as the dot-com crash started to affect my consulting business. It took several months for me to raise the money for the repair, during which my dead laptop was stored in Compaq's repair facility. They telephoned me periodically to ask about the money, and each time I said I was working on it.
Then, when I finally sent them their damn check, they asked for my authorization to "rebrick" my laptop. They wanted to erase my hard drive and put a factory-fresh Win98 installation on it. I had lots of files (not my development work) that weren't backed up. I didn't give them permission, but was very anxious until I got the laptop shipped by my mom, with my files, Windows NT, Linux and BeOS still intact.
By the time I was able to pay for the repair, I'd moved back to the U.S., to Maine. But they wouldn't ship to anywhere but the address the laptop came from. So my mom had to FedEx the laptop from Washington to Maine.
I will never, ever purchase a Compaq product again.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
It is way too easy to charge back on credit cards from outside the US. The merchant gets screwed with no recourse, even when physical goods are shipped. That is why we don't take credit cards from foreign banks. You like the protection that the credit card gives the consumer, but don't like what it forces on merchants.
I run an on-line store on the side and certain countries are on the black list. Quite simply, I can't afford the cost of fraud.
While fraud still exists in countries like the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, UK ... etc, the rate of fraud is such that we have yet to encounter it. At the beginning we have fulfilled orders to Hungary and other East European countries and the rate of fraud was about 50%. We simply can't afford that.
Get your government to track down and stop fraud. Still, it will be a **LONG** time before I can justify resuming services to blacklisted countries.
I have a question for you. Would you be interested in purchasing from us if we charged a $US30 surcharge for Hungarian orders and required a money transfer and we only shipped once the funds were in our account and a $US30 + 10% fee for processing returns.
Would you consider this rude and inappropriate ? If you do, then that is why we don't do Hungary.
is the iTunes Music Story only available in the US. Why, oh why, can't the music labels understand that this is a big thing? We Europeans are more than willing to pay for music over the net.
:-)
You need a US-registered credit card. Shouldn't there be some easy way to get such a card. Like www.americancreditcardsforsale.dot.
Ciryon
I have experienced this in a number of ways, and always concluded that North Americans think we in places like Australia are not aware we have electricity, postal services or the ability to exchange local currencies for foreign ones. In an email discussion group I operate for an old DOS-based computer game, we recently discussed this issue and have set up networks to get items shipped to local addresses, and then the purchaser gets the 'receiver' to ship the product to them and pays things between the two of them. Sure, it requires trust, but we're a discussion group that has existed for several years, and mostly trust each other. But it's a cruddy system that we're having to work around this, when we keep being told about globalisation, and a lot of businesses cannot handle simple overseas transactions through ebay....
Won't work, unless you have a non-PO box address in the US (or can prove citizenship, yadda yadda)
the main problem we face at my work is that international orders are hard to process because international institutions will not do billing address verifications therefore we need people from other countries to send us a faxed or scanned copy of their drivers license (or passport) and credit card they used with a consent to purchase signature. The reason being, is if a person who's billing address is not the same place we send the tickets to then we are considered at fault in any kind of credit card charge back, so basically you have visa, amex, discover etc... to blame for us making it hard at least, not sure about other online merchants but i would venture to guess its a problem. Not to mention we contact to confirm orders, so calling is tough to do because of different hours and long distance rules etc.... Email works but not if the consumer doesn't check it alot, also if they get back later when the merchandise is gone....
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
A Dell representative explained to me why they don't ship to Hungary. They're answer: "My hovercraft is full of eels."
Hope this helps!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Hi I'm just posting from my troll account to see if I can. My regular account won't allow me to post because it says I've already moderated the discussion. I haven't, but it's not as if Slashdot needs to bother testing their changes before putting them into production when they've got us to do it for them. How friggin lame.
---
Raising the bar on Slashdot trolling since 2003
And we're not talking about some "2nd and 3rd" world country here. We've been a democracy ever since we stopped being a bunch of colonies. You got to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon because of us (NASA forgot to check to see that they'd have a receiving station capible of receiving the pictures at the time of the walk). We invented the "pickup truck" and have gifted the world with Steve Erwin (sorry about that. We didn't even know he'd gone until three years after he made it big in the US, honest).
As for this question:
It is also the answer. A significant number of Americans seem to be proud of being this ignorant and seem to be of the belief that the US was the sole bastion of the first world up until you helped out all those red countries.. A lot of people from other countries find this strangely annoying.Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
I have the same problem in Europe. Nearly all of website with this problem are U.S. based websites. It seems like most U.S. companies forget that there exists a civilized world beyond its borders.
Try using Western Unions website to send money from France to Holland for example. Cant do it. You cant even call them and use the phone service. Its all for U.S. customers only.
There are loads and loads and loads of examples. Even more often its for stupid reasons, like it requires a phone number, and when you enter your phone number it comes back with "Oops youve entered too many digits for your phone number. Please enter your full 10 digit phone number with area code first" The same problem exists with postal codes.
European websites dont have this problem. Its just the American ones. Its quite frustrating, as I am also American, and would often like to order stuff from there. I usually just bring an empty suitcase when I go just so I can bring back what I cant buy over the web.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Then again, is this yet another example of the Internet and the rest of the world becoming more and more centered on the continental USA?
No, that is most companies trying to sell a product in thier country on the web.
For example, I race radio controll cars. Japan has the newest and more "professional" kits (carbon fibre, titanium, etc). Many not available in the US because of tarriffs - companies just don't have enough demand for them at the price. I make enough and want one. Unfortunatly it is VERY difficult to find someone that will ship what you want, replacement parts, and other misc items needed to run the car to the US.
One of my friends like "foreign" films (not made in the US). He has players for the regions he wants. It is difficult to get many of the DVD's shipped to the US.
There has never been the implication of everything on world accessable servers to sell to the world, wasn't using gopher, usenet, or the web - all of which had parts that were world visisble. In fact, it is not horribly uncommon to find web sites that will not sale outside of thier states as they do not want to deal with fraud issues and legalities between states, let alone international.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
The FTC has a running list of what tech can be exported to what countries. Hell, the shuttle is power by machines using 486's, how much computer power do you think a cruise missle needs? the more the gov't believes there is a real threat, the worse it will get.
Some countries *cough*Australia*cough* have given up and are just taking the piss instead (Did any of you watch The Dream hosted by Roy and HG during the Atlanta winter olympics? Yes those hard to pronounce placese are real, No they're nowhere near where they were on the map).
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Hey, Michael, guess what? I bought a Dell Dimension for my mother-in-law, and then...I took it out of the US! How d'ya like them apples?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Dell sells computers to all countries. Because Dell is a huge corporation they are able to squash all local competition. Dell gets everybody else's money. Everybody else complains because, once again, corporate America has cheated the world out of competition. Americans sure are greedy!
Quite simply, Apple has less marketing; they tend to go for the larger markets (such as Poland, Austria, and Norway), and leave alone the smaller countries in between (such as Lithuania and Hungary). If you want an Apple in Lithuania, you can (1) go to the one store in Vilnius, place an order, and wait two weeks, or (2) Go to Warsaw on a bus, get your computer same day, and return.
Clearly, the Vilnius operator just consolidates #2 for those who don't want to go to Warsaw.
Aside from that, there are still the issues of international law, taxes, tariffs, and dealing with criminality. Quite simply, if you send something valuable through Lithuanian post, it has an excellent chance of disappearing, computer equipment especially. Apparantly international studies point one finger (bribes) at the Customs department, but local people say no, it's the post workers themselves. I myself am kindof divided on the issue: I don't really know where the stuff disappears, just that it definitely does. I also know that I had tons of trouble even getting stuff through UPS, and UPS did not even inform me that it was held up! I had to start calling around, asking pointed questions before I finally found the item, convinced them that there was no legal way to apply a tariff, and they then sent it on. Note that they did not even send a note asking the intended recipient for the product. It seems they were just going to delay it until a time limit ran out, and take it. And UPS did not seem to have any ability to help, except to tell me where in their system the package had disappeared.
But that being the case, there's not a lot of point in paying a 500% insurance rate on shipping. Maybe it's the same in Hungary.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I think Romania got blacklisted for credit card fraud. Some webstores won't sell you anything above $100 or so.
As with the export restrictions, goods that have been already imported in the USA are subject to US export laws, although i doubt that Hungary is on the restricted destinations list -- they are even in NATO afaik.
Second, The main reason that most online merchants block orders from certain countries is because of the HIGH fraud originating from these countries.
Free Instant Site Inclusion
If you want to send cash by post, buy a women's magazine (say Better Homemaking -- nothing with too many pics of underdressed women), carefully place a large bill between two of the dark, shiny advertising pages, and glue the pages together so that they look like one. Better, if you pick unnumbered pages.
The cash used to regularly disappear from international post: apparently, they'd hold it up to bright light or even X-ray it to see what it held. Nowadays, it's even legal for them to take it, because it's illegal for you to ship it, if they signed on to the "US Post standards" international treaty.
Don't consider it theft--consider that they are simply helping you follow the law. 8-a
Better things you can do: (1) e-gold.com, but you could lose it, and few people take it. (2) Western Union (3) a bank that has branches (not affililates) in two countries and internet payment. Even multiple banks like that, might be useful. I could see using Hansabank to transfer money from a country like Latvia to Poland, and then CitiBank to take it from Poland to America. (4) New way: Find a way to pair up dual export businesses that do internet business across the borders. Get them in touch with each other, so that they just credit each other's accounts whenever possible. Then latch on to those transactions.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I don't have a problem, and I have friends in Hungary that I send to. What part of Budapest do you live in? I lived there 9 years ago, and just came from a vacation there. I noticed all the Burger Kings have Internet access for 99 forints for 20 minutes. That's progress. Back when I was there, you had to wait up to 14 years for a phone.
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
Funny, when I launch my browser I get dozens of X10 camera pages randomly sent to me without asking for them.
You've been spoiled by popup-blockers, I guess.
All's true that is mistrusted
According to the list, Hungary is on the list of fraud involving Australia, led by Czech Republic, Germany, and the Netherlands.
But as for that 55% statistic, I'm pretty sure he got it from here. Needless to say, if you see it on that site, and it is related at all to anything tech, you can be pretty sure it's correct.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
It's retaliation for sending us Magda, Eva and Zsa Zsa.
Looking here, one can see that the second greatest source of fraud in Australia seems to be the Netherlands.
However, what you refer to as Nigeria, would actually be the Nigerian spam, which most often involves some sort of "meet me in Amsterdam". Amsterdam, of course, is in the Netherlands.
So arguably, you could be right.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I live in Japan, and they won't even sell me computer equipment here locally because they are afraid it won't work with my computer and I will bring it back later. Destron (from California)
In Russia there is a company called Pregrad.Net (means "no barriers" in Russian). They take orders for products sold in any online store, then they buy them in the US and deliver to Russia themselves, taking care of customs, credit card problems (you can pay them with domestic money transfer), etc. They even buy products on eBay.
Of course, that doesn't directly help you in Hungary, but anyway...
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
You forgot University bookstores which have a 30% "gouge the suckers" tax. That's 30% to the penny, no matter wwhich University you're at, in Ontario anyways.
I found out last weekend that some media companies are actualy blocking domains outside the US. A friend in Japan tried to view sho.com (showtime) and they blocked him, saying they dont allow showtime outside the US, so there is no reason for people outside the US to view it.
The stupidity of companies doesnt even phase me anymore...
Hi esconsult1,
Can you me tell which hosting company are you using for selling your software? Do you have own merchant account or are you using some company for processing CC orders?
Thanks a lot in advance
Bromba
>o a Ukranian, a 3 year warrenty means that in 2 years, 11.5 months you bring your product back in for a replacement no matter what.
That is horrible. They don't have to spend 90+ minutes talking to a level one script reader to be escalated to level two support who will curtly cut you off and make you fill out a form demanding everything from the the original reciept (you do keep those in a fire-proof safe right?) to promises of handing over your first born if the product isn't really damaged or the damage was found to be your fault.
Or those retail scams to buy 'Super-warranty service' from the retailer only to find it means they ship your laptop off to the local "service center" where their tech monkeys poke at it with a stick for two weeks before just sending it to the manufacturer.
It gets worse from there.
>for example, the ass-backward EU and their mandated product warrenties
Business 101: the customer ends up paying for everything anyway. This means foreign companies are simply going to up the price for a localized version of that product. Problem solved. It happens all the time.
Put that Ayn Rand book down and you'll find that some of the real issues regarding the financial problems of Eastern Europe is fraud and lack of accountability.
Also, internationalism costs money regardless of what the local law is. Your organization still need to get hire regional experts/lawyers, translation services, beefier insurance, etc. Many Eastern European countries are not only havens for fraud but just poor to begin with; thus its still a niche and its not in the interest of many companies to even bother.
I visited Hungary just a few weeks ago, we wanted to rent a car to get there, but they wouldn't rent it to us because they cannot get the insurance for the car in Eastern European countries.
So we bought a car, the travel insurance to Hungarije was 15% or so higher then if we would have gone to Spain or some other western european country.
The economy is low so companies do everything to save money/not pay money. Terrorism is the mainstream accepted excuse. And since Hungary was under Socialist/Communist (which one was it agian?) reign till 1991 or so, places countries as such in the High Risk Countries category.
I hope things like these will resolve when Hungary joins the European Union. Not that I really want that, cause wealthy west-europeans will move to Hungary and destroy the beautifull countryside to build office buildings and such, and Hungarians will probably move to the west so you culture will be lost aswell... But thats a different discussion..
the web retailers in the us seem to have a realy strange attitued to selling to anywhere but their own back yard.
i've tried to get hold of a case of jolt in the uk, it like trying to milk a nat (no not NAT).
there are plenty of people who'll sell you a case, but only if you live in us/canada.
anyone would think i was trying to traffic drugs (although i've not tried, buying a bit of the white powder from over the pond would probably be easier).
there's nothing wrong with having a policy of letting funds clear before shipping to international customers. the only problem with doing that though is people tend to be a bit nervous of shelling out for something that won't be sent untill their money has already been taken.
I live in Poland. Thinkgeek won't sell to us. God know why. From time to time we write down what we need (T-shirts mostly, totals a few hundred $) and ask our friend in Germany to purchase them for us, then send.
The main reason most large companies won't sell to countries outside the US, is to protect the local distributers / wholesalers etc, in those markets. These companies often have exclusive rights to sell / distrubute in their countries, and pay for those rights. This dosen't work if (for example), Sony USA, is undercutting Sony NZ via the web.
It sucks for the consumer, who gets ripped at both ends. Paying higher prices in a artificially narrow market, and often not getting the same selection, options etc, available elsewhere.
You need to get yourself a mailbox in the US. There are some companies dealing with this. You just set up yourself an "virtual" mailbox with them and have your orders delivered to that mailbox. They will then send it to Hungary or whatever.
Well, if you'd live in Norway there is JetCarrier which a friend of mine speaks so warmly about.
Also there is Access USA which sends all over the world, but they do seem a bit pricey.
=-kiOwA-> EOF
Maine isn't REAL America. Places like Detroit and Houston and Palm Beach and Phoenix are REAL America. Why, you guys are right next to Vermont, and what have *they* given us? Howard Dean!
Mm, maple syrup.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Use the British version of Amazon for international orders. All products are available to ship to just about everywhere, and shipping time is much faster.
A-Bomb
Hungary will soon be part of the European Union. Things will become much easier for you then. (You still can't order everything from the U.S. -- but from a wealth of first-world EU countries, where people talk proper English!)
How many hungarian companies ship goods to, say, Australia or New Zealand?
or even to the U.S. for that matter?
ah if that's the case, then you shouldn't be using a ".com" suffix then. You should be using ".co.us" if you're only going to sell goods to US based addresses
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
First, let's get one thing straight. Businesses are online to MAKE MONEY, not act out political/social grudges against people of other countries. The almighty dollar is supreme, trust me.
So why do some of these eCommerce sites block certain countries? Simple: FRAUD.
Let me give you an example. A friend of mine has been running a successful web hosting company for a few years. In that time not ONCE has he gotten a legitimate order form Malaysia nor Vietnam. Each and every single time it's a case of fraud, which ultimately results in chargebacks. In case you didn't know, the merchant eats the chargeback + fine from their merchant account providers. Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover would like to have you believe they're the generous people granting you (the consumer) easy refunds with no hassles, when in reality it's the merchant that gets rammed up the a$$.
So, with the high risk of fraud, my friend has been forced to ban everyone from those 2 countries. Does he want business from people from these countries? Of course. But at the rate of the fraud vs. legitimate order ratio, it's just not feasible to allow orders from these countries.
So, if you really want to point your finger at someone, don't point them at these eCommerce sites. Instead point them at the criminals who operate out of these countries. Point them at the lazy/unaccountable administrators from these countries that leave their servers vulnerable enmasse to be hacked and used to commit fraud. Point your fingers at these governments that refuse to take any responsible actions to curb fraud when it is revealed and reported.
eTrade SUCKS
I've experienced the same problem.
...) wanted to sell to me. I'm still unclear as to why they wouldn't sell to me: The anti-fraud argument is not applicable here: Belgium's fraud rate for creditcards is (at 0.6% of total transaction volume) less than that in the US.
I live in Belgium. For the geographically-disabled: Belgium's a country in Europe that should be known for hosting the European parliament and the NATO-headquarters. Recently we've also caught some press with our politicians anti-Iraq-war attitude (you've gotta love politicians in pre-elections time).
Two months ago I've tried to buy a digital camera on several US-websites. The reason why I would have preferred buying in the US is that (not only for cameras) prices are about 30% cheaper than in the EU. Even after shipping, taxes, whatever. This is probably partly due to the current low price of the dollar compared to the euro, but also 'cause a lot off products are simply sold cheaper in the US (it's actually cheaper to buy a BMW in the US and ship it here, than buying it here: having a high standard of living has a rather unfortunate effect on prices).
None of the US-sites I've visited (Amazon, BestBuy,
Not being willing to set up the proper canals for selling seems a much likelier candidate: The shipping itself is probably no extra hassle, but we have for instance laws that say that any products that are sold here to customers (not businesses) should have manuals in our languages (Dutch, French and German). I can imagine that providing guarantees and other sorts of customer service aren't easy or cheap either.
I ended up buying locally at a higher price. (well actually: I bought it in The Netherlands so the shipping problem still applied and if I'll ever need the guarantee, I'm probably screwed anyway).
Bummer.
I have a photographic memory for numbers. I know almost a hundred of them.
You can test your geography skills here and learn more in the process.
Last took one of these tests 6 months ago and seem to have mastered Europe, at least.
Whilst Hungary may not be *cash* rich it is modern European Country, rich in History and Culture and will be joining the EU next year, which should give you a clue to how much of 'developed' nation it is. It certainly is not a second world country never mind 3rd. Historically it a super-power in it own right as the Center of Austro-Hungarian Empire.
More on Hungary.
While I tried to purchase details from a user/store o eBay and (although I primarily live in Europe) was visiting the USA, the store just ignored the won auction. What you do after having sent credit card details, shipping information and some "hellooo?"-mails, just to get ignored, is giving them the finger in your review of them. That on the other hand caught their attention. Anyway, to get rid of the bad looking review they tried offered me free stuff in exchange for that I remove the review. But, if they don't ship what the get paid to ship, why should the ship free stuff... h
No one in the US can find Hungary on a map.
One quick way to remedy that: have the US declare war on Hungary. Before September 11th, most Americans couldn't tell you where Afghanistan was on a map and I'd bet that most of them couldn't tell you today the name of its capital (and this only a year or so after a US invasion).
I visited my cousin in US during the summer of 1989. I was shocked to hear a contestant on a game show who was asked to name five countries in South America include Spain and Portugal in his answer. Similarly, a poll in the paper at the time showed that most American high school students thought that Britain was off the coast of Florida. I can't help but think that another 14 years has made the situation worse rather than better, especially with the US public education system in such a sorry state.
There are ignorant people everywhere but it does the US no favours to pretend that they don't flourish within its boundaries. For proof you only have to look at George W Bush, who can't even string together two intelligent sentences if his words haven't been scripted for him by a speechwriter beforehand - and he has the benefit of an Ivy league education.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Literacy definition: age 15 and over can read and write
k /prin t/us.html
o ok/prin t/hu.html
United States
male: 97%
female: 97% (1979 est.)
total population: 97%
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factboo
Hungary
total population: 99%
male: 99%
female: 98% (1980 est.)
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factb
Score: +6, Booyah
I know you were joking, but I want my Karma, so I'm going to reiterate your post in a serious tone.
Particularly during the dotcom boom, there was a widespread expectation that the Internet would lead to a worldwide free market in goods and services. The reality is that commerce is, in the most part, restricted by the same laws, customs and general prejudices as in the pre Internet era.
Funny, but I thought amazon, dell and IBM all had hungarian branches.
Looks like the poster hasn't even looked for non-USian versions of the sites he mentions. I'm English, and I never look at amazon.com - amazon.co.uk is what you need for UK deliveries. amazon.co.hu was my first guess for the hungarian version, and Bingo...
Warning: May contain nuts
Okay so there is no Women in this post!
.com (Mostly US sites) I have to get them shipped from the US to the UK Get hit by the TAX, then send it to Hungary, out of the EU then claim the Tax back from the UK then the UK back from the US. After that I have to perform the Tango jump up 3 times click my shoes and hope that 5 weeks after ordering the goods they get to Hungary in one piece.
Its all to do with the tax and postal service. My wife's family live in Hungary (Szolnok). If I want to get things sent from
I'm French, in France. Not exactly 3rd world with massive insecurity, we have smart cards and online banking for 15 years.
/. I give my Eurocard/Mastercard (accepted by Amazon FR,UK & US), and I receive a mail that this is refused, as the risk factor is too high!
/. perhaps thought that France and US would be at war 2 weeks later? :-) .cc domain (Coco Islands, Australian territory) raised a trigger in the database.
A few months ago, I decided to subscribe to
It was during the Irak crisis, so
Or, more probably my address in a
Anyway, I complained by mail. No answer, but it succeeded when I tried again a few weeks later.
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
Can't ship anhything higher than 56bit encryption over the border, guess what window's has in it? And they can't sell unbundled hardware... It's little laws like that which make it impossible for some retailers top ship worldwide; they'd be pissing off the cia or fbi or some federal or state agency that thinks they're giving some teenager in india the equipment to hack the pentagon right out of the box.
It's bullshit and it's going to kill our economy in the long run. Other countries will begin to produce their own hardware and software independant of us and they'll be able to ship to us but not vice versa.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Ha! Try and get motorcycle accessories that were not intended for the US. Honda (kinda a big company) will ship parts for their new ST1300 to UK and the rest of Europe, but not the US. Mind you, the bike is sold in the US, just not some of the niffty doo-dads like the top box and back rest. Can you order these parts through Honda US? No. Honda Japan? No. Honda UK? No. You have to resort to ordering from one of a few small shops in UK that's more interested in making some scratch than anything else.
You can't imagine the saga that has gone on trying to get body parts that were made in France.
Amazon US does not sell electronic devices oversea. Have you tried the european subsidiaries (amazon.fr / amazon.de / amazon.co.uk)?
In the EU, we have a common currency (well, 12 countries on 15), but postal and bank charges, and cultural habits are still a problem to international business.
I wanted to buy a Palm Zire. Price is okay in France, where I live, but warranty is 1 year.
In Germany the warranty is 2 years, and it matters for such items (already burnt by a 700 digital camera whose screen died 13 months after buying). It seemed like a good idea; the VAT is even less (16% against 19.6%).
I live near the border, but the local German stores were too expensive. I found some websites, but was deceived: many of them do not accept credit cards, the Germans are not used to it so much. They like direct transfers from account to account ("Überweisung"). On the contrary, French online sellers all accept credit cards for 20 years (*). Direct transfers are very seldom or for firms (salary), and expensive. I would have to pay ~15 to send the money, or wait more than a week!
(And this including the recent EU laws that don't allow banks to charge more for transfers in between EU countries than inside their own country.)
International postage was much much more expensive: 22 from the German sites... againt 0 from a Parisian well-known site. And this is only postage; I don't think the German handler would have had to fill much paperwork.
So postage cost+bank cost+bank delay+shipping delay win on warranty+small win on VAT. I've bought online from Paris.
And I'm fluent in German. Language barrier is another big problem for many people (even English for much Frenchies).
So our friend from Hungary may have problems too, even when its country will enter the European Union next year. (Gargl, 10 new countries at a time, it will be a nice mess...)
(*) Yeah, before the Net. Minitel, it was called.
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
I live in the US and a problem I often hit is companies who refuse to ship to a PO box. This is a real PITA for someone who doesn't have an easy place to receive UPS or FedEx packages during the day. I find the PO quite convenient and cheap especially for small items.
If I reluctantly agree to UPS or FedEx then I sometimes have another problem because my credit card statements go to my PO box and some online companies don't allow different shipping and billing addresses.
The big names (eg Amazon) seem to be smart enough to solve both of these but lots of little ones don't.
My company sells books and we sell about half to clients overseas. The biggest issue for us is the security of the postal system so we ship everything registered mail. We have had one shipment that was returned because the post office at the receiving end failed to notify the customer they had a package, perhaps due to the notice being lost in the mail. We have had zero fraud attempts. However, books are high margin items and we lose little if there is fraud or a lost shipment, but if we were selling low margin items such as computers we could probably not afford the risk of overseas sales. For every country you ship to, you would have to analyze and mitigate risks pertaining to shipping, insurance, fraud, etc.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
Sweet! Thanks, that now solves my problems.
Dont even let you see the page! I think they redirect people on the basis of IP-Range.
WWW.SHO.COM
We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.
First, the US is a pretty, um, big market. If you only intend to sell toward this market, the internet is still more than viable as a means to this end.
Second, international shipping rates are pretty high. This makes it difficult to compete with businesses which may have a local presence in your country.
Third, there's all kinds of import and export regulations that make selling outside of your country a non-casual proposition. There's tariffs, fees, etc., all which take a nice big bite out of your profits. This pretty much rules out all but the bigger players in the market.
Fourth, international fraud is difficult to fight. Unless the company has a presence in the country where the perpetrator of a fraud is located, that country's local government is probably not going to be very cooperative. They've got enough things to worry about policing their own. If you're lucky, and the country you're doing business with has extradition treaties set up with the US, you might be able to get someone extradited, but for petty crimes it's highly unlikely. Extradition is a fairly serious matter, and usually reserved for serious crimes.
So, really, there's plenty of reasons for not doing business with the rest of the world. Most of them are legal, and thus in some sense artificial and of our own collective doing, but all of them are pragmatic.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
See also International Mail Forwarding Advisor.
I think the problem is largely to do with the traditional sales channel and geographic regions than anything to do with politics (although fraud does enter the equation significantly). The cost structure in each country is different - there is a price to be paid for the welfare state of most European countries and that cost is bourne by the consumer at the end of the channel. When a manufacturer sets up distribution sales channels, the local reseller will typically win a geographic exclusion zone that says within a given area, they have the exclusive right to that market.
So, while the WORLD wide web might allow you to see what is being offered in other locations, just because you can see it doesn't mean that resellers are ALLOWED to sell it to you. Early on, before most manufacturers had figured this out, they probably didn't care - a sale to them was a sale regardless. But whem local sales channels start to lose all their business to someone outside the country that doesn't have their cost structure, they will complain to the manufacturer or whoever gave them the exclusive geographic zone saying that competitors are unfairly eating into their territory. Those companies are then going to have to start going after resellers that are selling outside their territory. On the Internet, that means companies like Amazon or any other big name seller.
Companies like Dell, which have no 'channel', have slightly different but related problems. In their case, at some point they will do enough sales that they essentially are considered to have a local presence. At that point, the local govt is going to come talking wanting their share of the tax dollars and / or enforcing laws governing requirements for manuals in the local language or meeting local regulations, etc. This leads them to offering only specific items for those local markets because the volumes would not be significant enough to make all their products meet local market conditions.
So in the end, while it's frustrating, it's not going to get better. The only reason it was allowed at all was simply that the volumes on the net were not originally big enough that local channels were concerned at loss of market to online resellers. But those days are long gone and local resellers are definitely vocal about it. So while you continue to live in a welfare state, don't expect to get products that don't help pay for the privileges afforded by living in that state.
Check out http://www.onebin.com this is probably the best solution for anyone buying outside the US. You can have a physical US address where the items can be delivered and then you can consolidate them and ship them together to save money. It's like an online fright forwarder.
I work in e-commerce. First, I'm sure a LOT of the issues that you're running into now have to do with the EU adopting their new Digital VAT (Value Added Tax) for all online orders as of July 1, 2003. Digital VAT has removed a lot of incentive to support online sales in Europe. The increased software costs retard sales, and the legal costs of figuring seperate tax rates for each country, paying the taxes to the country, etc., becomes a nightmare. To get better VAT rates, companies can maintain physical presence in a EU country and charge that country's VAT rate for all EU sales (Luxembourg offers the lowest VAT, but doesn't have the infrastructure to support large e-commerce, so my employer chose to locate a service center in the UK)
There are also a number of other issues that we have worked to accomodate.
The biggest issue for software (we deal mainly in software) sales abroad is piracy. My employer has developed/is developing solutions to solve this issue.
Another major issue is the fact that sites have to be developed in many languages to make sales in those countries possible. Sure, you speak English, but the majority of people in foreign countries prefer to place orders/order in their native language.
Finally, credit card processing to many countries (Russia, Philipines, China, Thailand, etc.) is very difficult because the authorization network is not 100% compatible with the US (Where most online stores are based.)
The views expressed here are not the opinion of nor authorized by my employer, Digital River, they are simply things that I have come across in dealing with the online stores that are run through their systems.
The emperor is naked.
Lots of web shops simply won't ship to countries like Hungary. Why? Because there's an overwhelming amount of credit card fraud occurring over the web from third world countries where there is no systems in place to prosecute criminals.
At some point, Visa, Mastercard, etc will tell web shops that they will not accept payment for an item that is destined for those locations.
My wife runs an internet children's book shop (I won't plug it here), and while there are no countries we have 'banned' there are several areas we flag as high risk: Eastern Europe, especially Rumania, and Southeast Asia, especially Singapore and Indonesia.
An order from there, especially multiple copies of items, books oriented toward teens such as comic book collections, etc., will raise a red flag, especially if a US credit card is used.
There's a issue with the credit card processors: They charge more for handling ex-US shipments, because of a higher risk, but if you put a foreign address in they make no attempt to verify the address. But what do they care? They don't accept any risk, except for the customer payment of the card. Everything else is risk to the merchant.
So our typical response is to request a photocopy of both sides of the credit card e-mailed or faxed to us. Often, the customer never replies in cases where we suspect fraud. We've only had one customer refuse to fax us the card (hey, we already had her number, what's the big deal), and she ordered it to her home in the US and shipped it overseas herself.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Bingo. I recall reading an article a few years ago regarding why amazon.com was pulling out of a number of foreign markets. The reason was credit card fraud. If memory serves, the fraud rate out of Brazil, for example, was 80%!!!
Hungary web site for DELL
Who is this guy kidding?
They probably have to jump through hoops to do international sales, or something. I'm far from an expert in this area, but I'll take a stab that there's a lot less red tape when you're only selling within the country.
Just my $.02.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
and the sites are specifically for US customers, no drama, no pack drill. The reasons why this is so are many and varied and irrelevant. Deal with it.
Are they losing customers, probably, but then the economy of Hungary is 1% the size of the US so do they care? Probably not. Indeed the US is 20% of the world economy and the countries that make up the vast majority of the consumable other 80% almost certainly do have web sites that will service their needs.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
money or valuables in the mail to him because the mail will get ransacked after it arrives in his country. So instead of sending him money so he can buy stuff locally, I send him copies of Linux distros marked as 'free software', and books marked as 'used', and computer parts marked as 'old hardware'... i.e., I make them sound as worthless as I can. I don't insure the shipment, that's a sure sign it is valuable. I send it by US Mail. About 7 to 12 weeks later he recieves them.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Go to http://techbargains.pricegrabber.com/, search for your item, and then click on the Show only merchants who ship internationally. So not only do you find a whole heap of stores that will ship to you, but you can also bargain hunt all on the one page. It's certainly a big help.
They can refuse to accept the deal if they want (Business Law 101).
WTF? Over?
Open the two together and note the differences in typeface. And why is there no mention of Jaguar/Panther/Anything 10.x.x on the Hungary site?
The multinationalization efforts are easy enough to spot on the Dell Hungary page too. And the difficulties in translation too -- some portions are still in English.
I can see here where the differences in companies' national sites would drive people to use the one with more information and choices.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Well I dont know about the others, but Apple has seperate websites for selling to other countrys, like most manufacturers do (car companies, etc.) You might be going to the US site, which of course will not sell outside the country Likewise there are also export rules that must be followed by these companies, thanks in large part now from Sept 11, but that where even there BEFORE then. I cant help to remember the whole G4 Supercomputer ads from apple where that fact was, the computer (at the time since the classification changed later) was actually TOO POWERFUL to export out of the country. Heck even the Playstation 2 has a restriction on it cause the chip "COULD" be used as a missle guidence system. As for iTunes, they where going to be releasing it to europe but its the Music Companies Themselves who put the squash on it for now because of the weird sales laws all of the European Union has, since each country has a different sales law for the MP3's (or rather MP4's) and how much an artist gets. Honestly your still expecting too much for the global aspect of things, its only been 10 years since the web has started the be a more than geek object. It will getthere, but we have a ton of paper law that has to be changed, and you know goverment.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
In Maximum PC recently there was an article about a guy in the military that had problems getting stuff delivered to an APO/FPO address, as a lot of online web software simply did not support these types of addresses.
I don't have the article in front of me, but basically someone wrote in the next month and stated how they got around this limitation.
Pretty much this: instead of stating 'APO/FPO' for the state, the package would be addressed to the state that handles the mailing of that particular locations mail. I think there were only a few. I believe in the address part (second line, perhaps? was actually where the APO/FPO info was put.
The writer stated that he had never had a problem getting any packages after that.
I'm not trying to insult your intelligence, but I've seen people who are affiliated with the military or government have problems because they thought they had to use overseas shipping. If you have an APO/FPO mailbox, you can have things sent there. It's still the US Postal Service at that point
Simply enter APO or FPO, whichever applies, as the city. Enter AE as the state if it's a text field. Alternately, if it's a drop list use NY as the state, because overseas mail going to the military are all routed through New York.
If you try this I promise it will work, I did it many times and never once had a problem. It's still the American postal service, so you don't have any problem with overseas shipping, normal rates still apply
I think a civilian can also obtain an APO/FPO box, but only if you're working for the US government. I'm not certain on that one.
Failing that, you could maybe ask a soldier to let you use his/her mailing address for this purpose.
I apologize if this has already been mentioned, I'm too lazy to scroll through all the replies and check.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
I am Hungarian and a frequent webshopper. Some company have asked me to send an email with the scan of the credit card itslef. If you do not hold the physical card, only a stolen number, it's indeed hard to do... Someone else asked for a copy of a bank statement which has the card number and holder name on it. And so on. If a company _wants_ do business, it will. There are solutions. Yes, they are a bit inconvenient, but as a customer I can understand the sellers' concerns about fraud and I'm happy to cooperate.
Basically - most companies are not ready, don't have the system to support consumer based selling from the U.S. to The Rest OF the World.
again, is this yet another example of the Internet and the rest of the world becoming more and more centered on the continental USA?
The world wide web started in the US as a government program so it is difficult to make the claim that it is "becoming more and more centered on the USA".
These policies are an individual companies decision and they have the right to make such policies especially in the face of internet taxation.
I wish that the internet was as free as it once was however politics and greedy governments are working to destroy it all. It is only going to get worse.
"Amazon cite difficulties with warranty returns as their reason"
Doesn't Amazon have a patent panding for this excuse? -m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
> You can't imagine the saga that has gone on trying to get body parts
;)
> that were made in France.
Body parts, hell, try getting *organs* that were made in France!
BTW, I feel for you. Have you tried ordering the same parts from Canada? Sometimes we get moto.stuff that you guys don't.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Where are all the Hungarian ecommerce sites?
Not to be snide, but small to mid-size businesses in the US often don't ship oversees because of the hassles and liabilities of foreign transactions. God knows its getting tough enough just to deal with the tax and commerce laws, and shipping for 50 states, never mind hundreds of countries.
I highly doubt all small Hungarian businesses are selling to the US.
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
Another problem is VAT. The EU has decided, in all it's wisdom, to charge web vendors, no matter where that company resides, VAT. That means a retailer in, say, Idaho, now has to register, collect, and remit VAT in Europe for any sales to a European customer. Is it any wonder some retailers outside Europe may consider closing sales there? And people say Socialism cannot work ;-)
Oddly enough companies outside the US are almost always willing to sell to US customers. I've ordered things from Canadian, UK, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Austrailian web sites and companies. I've rarely had a problem
Sure, it's a matter of size and being worth their while. America has a 280 million potential customers and a $10 trillion economy and a single, well established (fairly) predictable legal system. Singapore by contrast has 4 million potential customers and a $106 million dollar economy. Setting up the infrastructure to sell to that market (translation, understanding & adapting to local laws, etc. etc.) is difficult & expensive the market is so small it may not even end up being profitable, why bother when there are so many more people in America (or perhaps Europe, or the larger "anglosphere" countries) that have yet to buy your product. Even Austrailia where there is no language barrier and the legal system is essentially the same (also based on English common law with presumption of innocence, jury trials etc.) but still has only 19 million customers and a $528 billion dollar economy is not necessarily going to be worth bothering with if you're a small or medium-sized American business. Still most large American (and very many small) companies DO sell to all or most of the countries you mention - they just don't sell to them from their American web sites.
Let me give you my assurance that Rez is well worth buying, with or without its optional masturbation gadget. I got my copy brand new. at the full $50 list price nearly a year ago. It remains the jewel of my PS2 collection.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
My SO works for a large online transaction processor; they don't accept transactions from entire countries or regions, due to rampant fraud in those areas.
...
I assume that it is due to lack of enforcement of support from law enforcement in those areas
Considering he's an American expat, I expect he prolly wants his crap in English anyway. I suspect this is the deal - he wants AMERICAN stuff while living in Hungary. Sorry, tho, that's just not how things work sometimes. The poster acts like this is some big US conspiracy to 0wnz0r the WWW, but it's generally a logistics thing - the few sales companies would get from Hungary isn't worth dealing with Hungary.
Considering the US has anachronistic laws dealing with export control of encryption and such, as well as other problems, it isn't worth the trouble of having the main sales unit deal with each country. For big companies like IBM, they have a unit for each country that are (hopefully) experts in local issues. So really, the only people with problems here are US expats who want stuff in English instead of the local language. In other words, him.
My advice to the guy would be to have some family in the states to order it for him and ship it. But complaining isn't going to help, and making it into some US vs. the world thing is silly.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Glad you mentioned customs delays and "disapperances" of packages inside the post office. both have happenied to me. And, don't forget that custom officers often assume that anyone who can afford to ship something from the U.S. can afford to slip them some cash. It's amusing how money can help find you "lost" package.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Heh.
Sigh... nobody posted this, as far as I'm aware:
A comparison matrix of the 6 major Mail Forwarding Services.
They all work the same way: They give you an US address, and everything shipped to this address is forwarded to your real address anywhere in the world.
Have fun!
Sigh... nobody posted this, as far as I'm aware:
A comparison matrix of the 6 major Mail Forwarding Services.
They all work the same way: They give you an US address, and everything shipped to this address is forwarded to your real address anywhere in the world.
Have fun!
Take an overseas order for $11,000.00
Doing everything by the "Book" when processing the card.
Finding out 2 months later the card was stolen, when the card company removes the funds from your account.
Getting NO help, support, relief from the card company, now thats fucking priceless!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Al Gore decided to rename the confusing acronym WWW (World Wide Web) to AAA (America's Amazing Amass).
Don't forget to rename your sites to aaa.company.com
After this break, more news about Al Gore sueing Gutenberg over patent infrightment. We all know that Al Gore invented writing and is now seeking damage from all publishers.
-- Leeeter than leet
What is worse is the APO AE problem
Anyone that was/is in the military overseas knows what I am talking about. The military set up a special state called AE (and others) for Armed forces Europe. Many sites do not let you buy things and send them to AE becouse it is not in the list of states. The worst part is that the price of shipping to an AE account is NO MORE THAN shipping to a NY address.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Just setup a plan with a trused friend or relative in the states to accept deliveries and forward them to your foreign address.
This probably won't work in extreme circumstances and will cost money and time for the extra shipment, but it's less inconvenient than not being able to make a purchase at all.
Then again, you might run into hassles if you have to deal with returns, refunds and such.
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. ~A. Perlis
I currently work for a very large online retailer. As everyone has previously suggested, fraud is the answer. From our fraud department, nearly 33% of the orders that we received from over sea's, when we did oversea's shipping, were fraud orders. It's just not worth it.
As many other posters have pointed out the reason many businesses in the US refuse transactions from eastern Europe is fraud. But dont feel bad. We dont take orders from Puerto Rico either and they are one of our territories.
Just have the product shipped to someone in the US, and have them ship it to you. You might even be able to have the product shipped directly to you, while using a billing address in the US.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Naw, just tell him to go to Lou Malnati's of Chicago. They'll bake him an awesome deep-dish pie, quick-freeze it, toss it in with some dry ice, and send it to him by FedEx overnight, anywhere in the U.S. of A. (So our Hungarian friend is still out of luck, but at least the guy in LA is OK :)
> "Why aren't you calling pizzerias in Los Angeles?" I'd ask,
Or Chicago :)
Ah, high-speed transcontinental pizza delivery. I love this country!
That guy in New Zealand (or Australia, I can't remember) who is building the missile has had no problems whatsoever last I heard, getting all of the parts he needs shipped to him from the states.
And yet.... an expat in Hungary can't buy a laptop?
Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture?
*A Life Without Compromise*
Back in early 1999, I was involved in a business venture with my roommate. We opened an online music store to sell electronica vinyl and CDs. Our goal was to offer an alternative to the 800lb gorilla (Satellite Records).
Fast forward to mid-2000. Sales were starting to increase significantly and my roommate's wife began to run the store full-time (my friend and I still had normal dot-com day jobs). We used Worldpay, or some other international credit card processing and verification service. Over a 4 or 5 week period in the summer we got orders of $100, $200, $300. Record bags and orders of 20+ records. At the time, this was relatively normal as business was picking up. The credit cards were all checked through the service (matched 1st line of mailing address, city, state, zip/postal, country).
Suddenly, in one day we got about $900 in chargebacks on 2 or 3 cards. All were orders placed in the Czech Republic and as far as we knew, the order information was verified. Over the course of several days we received more chargebacks as people received statements. When all was said and done, about 4 cards were used. We incurred about $3000 in damage because of it.
The credit card processing company was less than helpful, and the FBI even got involved as it was an international fraud case. We never got any money back, no one was ever caught, and ultimately this relatively small case of fraud caused us to close up shop a few months later.
The whole experience definitely soured my ambition in wanting to reach a global audience. We sold a lot of records to people in England, France, and Belgium. I'd estimate 60% of our sales initially were from overseas, but thinking back it's probably because no on else would sell to them. Perhaps things have changed since then, but there is no cheap, easy, or compelling reason for anyone that isn't Amazon or Outpost to sell to people overseas. Logistically it's a huge pain in the ass and as I learned first hand, it can also be devastating.
I recently tried to buy myself a couple of special swimsuits for running triathlons. I found a number of places in the States that would supply them, but for whatever reason, they refused to send any shipment by the not-that-slow, and still very insurable parcel post, instead favouring the likes of FedEx and UPS. The prices these two firms charge to ship 300 grams worth of swimwear from the US to Canada is outrageous, and essentially doubled the cost of the swimsuits. I explored other options, and eventually found a firm in the UK that had similar suits and had no problem with shipping through the post, so I bought four suits at less than the cost of one suit through the American firms.
TruWest, you have wonderful looking suits, but you're shutting out so much of your market. Allen's of Kingsbury will have my business every time over your exorbitant rates. Fucking Speedo Authentic Fitness won't even deal outside the US, even though they have an outlet store on Bloor St. in Toronto!
It's intresting how most of the http://www.ibm.com/countrycode/ URLs have an 'ethnicaly apropriate' person on the front, but why does cn, china's, have like a french guy?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I own a small business, and I do ship internationally. The majority of my business is US based, but we do ship all over the world.
And, boy, is it a pain. First, UPS and FedEx, while nice, charge an arm and a leg to ship internationally. The one pound rate for UPS is about 5-20 times more expensive than the post office depending on the location. Customers won't pay for the expensive shipping.
Second, when the customer chooses the cheap shipping, you can't track it. The US Postal Service tosses your box into the void, and who knows where it goes from there.
Third, after the post office loses your package, the credit card company comes back after you saying that the item wasn't received. Charge back time. That's a $25 charge plus you lose the money for the sale.
And, if it does go through, there's the paperwork. I need to fill out a form in triplicate for packages over 5 lbs. The US Postal Service doesn't have software that does this automatically, of course. By hand, every time.
Oy.
Fraud of course is a issue. But shipping and customs clearance is a larger issue which prevents many companies from shipping internationally. What one usually does is to hand off the shipment to a Freight Forwarder who handles all the paperwork and shepherds the package through ALL of the customs agencies. Every time a package crosses a international border it is "inspected" and taxed (or stolen) the forwarders job is to ensure that the paperwork and shipment of the product actually occurs instead of the package langushing in a customs hold area. That at least is the theory most of the forwarders are not automated so tracking packages is a manual process and remember not all shippers operate in all countries so you can have a situation where the package is intially shipped via Fedex then to DHL then to BAX and finally back to fedex for final delivery. In short most businesses who are not in the international logistics business do not have the resources to handle international transshipment of product.
Tell him to use the Anonymizer, www.anonymizer.com. I used it here in Canada to load sho.com, no problems, it's a little slow but it works.
------ Will of Iron, Knees of Jello.
While I really do appreciate their efforts to reduce fraud, it didn't hit home until I hit me (of course, duh). It'd be nice if there was a way to pre-approve offshore charges, say, on the card web site so that I don't have to go through the Keystone Cops routine again. But consider that the most I can do on the website is pay my bill, allowing such functionality might further imperil my card number. Can't win.
I half expect the next month's charge to be flagged. At least O'Reilly sends me email about it instead of freezing the service for me.
OTOH, to show off my ugly-American side, why does O'Reilly, ostensibly a USA company, use an offshore clearinghouse if there's going to be difficulty with charge companies? (Obvious answer: because it's cheaper!!!)
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
There have been some useful answers as to why you can't get stuff shipped to Hungary: credit card fraud, excessive credit card handling fees, possible need for export/import documents...
Fine, but I live in Canada. None of these apply. Our credit cards have very similar fraud rates, and there are no extra fees for merchants charging a Canadian card. Heck, I can even get a US Dollar card drawn from Citibank if ya like.
Even those merchants who don't flatly refuse to sell to me make it prohibitively expensive by making their lowest tier international service "DHL 1-hour delivery - $529.99." Thanks guys, but you can just throw that in a box and send it parcel post. I'll pay the duty when the mail carrier comes to my house. I've had this argument with ThinkGeek a few times, and they cannot even comprehend the basic concept of mailing something to a non-US address.
For me, at least, this is maddeningly frustrating. It should be entirely transparent to the merchant to send stuff to me in Canada. The credit card gets charged in USD, and it bills me with the current rate. Merchants don't need to fill out any forms; Canada Post (or UPS, or FedEx) does that for me when I get the package. Same as above with duty and taxes.
Considering that this process is transparent to the merchant, those who say "Only ship to USA" or those who only offer expensive shipping to Canada are making a very clear statement about their priorities. I don't know what that statement is, considering that I'm trying very hard to give them my money, but there's a statement in there for sure.
What does this have to do with the Internet?
Twenty years ago you could have placed a phone call from Hungary to any of hundreds of mail-order houses in the United States and they would have refused to sell to you, then, too.
It's just plain difficult to sell internationally to consumers. The myriad regulations, taxes, and fraud problems just aren't worth the trouble and never have been for most businesses. On a B2B level where you're dealing with wholesale quantities, things are different.
50% of all credit card fraud is for consumer electronics. Online fraud is the fastest growing form of credit card fraud. Shipping from the US to non-US addresses is more difficult to track, making it more difficult to collect enough information to prosecute. And eastern Europe is wher the largest chunk of online credit card fraud is coming from.
Unfortunately, that means you're hosed.
BTW, it's not the web sites that are your problem, it's the banks that issue the credit cards. They are increasingly willing to refuse transactions on the slightest hint of anything suspicious, using arcane and complicated rules. The merchants can't even find out why a particular transaction was refused, but they don't want to tell that to you, so you get whatever reasonable sounding excuse they can think of.
Maybe retailers in Hungary, or at least the EU could get one on order thru trade contacts - this is standard practice in the rural UK, where shops stock next to nothing but can order almost anything. If you buy from the EU and let the US economy slide... generally. With a little inflation or another corruption scandal or two, alongside costly and otherwise offtopic ventures in the middle east, the US is heading for a crash. In a decade, maybe Daewoo would be manufacturing chips on the cheap in California to dump on the European market at an obscene markup... oh the irony. The question of terrorist concerns is a joke. If they realy cared Microsoft would be forced to tighten up security, rather than getting away with murder for a few dollars contribution.
I feel your pain... I myself live in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, which is roughly 30 minutes north of the USA/Canada border, and I constantly find restrictions on the internet not only as to what I can buy, but also what I can do! Canada is pretty much as close as one can get to the good old US-of-A without actually being a Yank, and yet there are many, many things online not accessible to me as they are "US Only". So much for the Internet and "World Wide Web" bringing down borders....
The FCC prohibits a lot of things being shipped outside. Plus, even though a lot of power supplies are auto-sensing, not all of them will switch between some of the incogruous electrical systems out there. Fraud may be part of it, but a lot of it is also just plain Export Compliance with federal regulations, so that electronics don't readily fall into the hands of countries and organizations that they wouldn't normally do business with.
It seems like most U.S. companies forget that there exists a civilized world beyond its borders.
/. post...
Please define civilization good sir! It seems from other posts, some from actual merchants that there is a high FRAUD rate in many international shipments. But I won't dwell on this as it has already been mentioned. Repeatedly.
The US has laws prohibiting the export of many high-tech items. These laws are largely cold-war relics, but they are kept alive by China and by the terrorist threat. Whether these threats are real, or whether these measures have any impact is another issue entirely.
"Civilized" nations like France and Germany exploited the Iraqi/UN Food for Oil and the corrupt(?) rulers cleared 1 billion USD.
But back to the original
US companies sell to US residents first because they they represent the most lucrative market. The reason why the various EU nations are sacrificing their sovreignty is that they hope to build a similarly lucratice market.
One final note. There are 50 states in the US. Each has its own laws which, while fairly similar, can cause no end of headaches for businesses. In the US, small companies deal with this by working only with the laws that apply in the state(s) in which they are located. FOR EXAMPLE, a single location company based (and located duh) in New Hampshire (tiny little state in the Northeastern US) can sell and ship anything to anyplace in the USA, and does not need to charge any Sales Tax. They also are generally subject to New Hampshire state laws if sued or whatnot. If that same company wanted to ship to the EU, they'd have to worry about local consumer laws, VAT, not to mention tariffs etc... For each international shipping destination, any company has an additional set of laws to account for. This can add up to huge costs... even for large compaies.
FWIW
Hi folks,
I am a Hungarian living in Hungary.
I buy on the web, from Australian DVDs to American books. All with a Hungarian Bank issued web-based virtual card.
Of course, you have to understand, that vendors are not selling out of US, because of CHANNEL POLICIES. I am working in the IT industry, and I learn this on my own skin.
Is this acceptable? Well, I could always find a solution to get something If I really wanted. And I am not even an American, who has relatives all over that continent, and can buy through them.
Soon, we will be in the EU. This will change some things - like shopping from other EU countries (eg. amazon.co.uk) will be easier.
Our company drop-ships from many different suppliers. None of them have their act together with regards to shipping, but do just well enough to get by on intra-US shipping. However, *none* of them are able to RELIABLY ship outside of the US. That means that we'll LOSE money in headaches, hastles, lost merchandise, and support calls. It's unfortunate, because if these suppliers had their act together, they could exploit a global market, and make more money. There just aren't any suppliers in this market that are able to do it, the exporting is done by smaller fish down the food-chain.
There's also another factor: There are certain geographical areas (which shall remain unnamed) from where there are ten times more fraudulent orders than legitimate orders. In those areas, it's easiest (and usually most profitable) to simply not do business with ANYONE.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
No one in this long multi-thread has viewed this issue from the other direction, namely that many countries, including Canada, do not want you to buy anything from away. They are the authors of most of the complicating factors to international trade being discussed here, not the US government or the web vendors. The Web is a wide open place, but countries still have solid borders.
Why did you move to Hungary in the first place?
This whole article sounds like terrorist talk to me.
Now that we're done with Afghanistan and Iraq, I think we found our next target: Hungary.
Just go and stand next to your local post office, a "special package" from the U.S. Air Force is on its way.
Guess we haven't totally polluted the .com namespace after all. Bob's Bread and Cheese shop in Wisconsin really wanted bbc.com but some euro took it.
.com sites. Basta with the anti-americanism already.
And I guess then that the Italian Alps are really in the US? www.bormio.com
There are quite a few non-US
I haven't seen anyone address the US-only restriction on iTunes. Can't blame that on shipping or warranty return complications. Apple doesn't give a reason for the restriction on their site, at least not that I could find. I suspect that getting international distribution rights is insanely complicated, but I'm just guessing.
Anybody know the real story?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
My company www.streamzap.com does ship to as many countries as possible, but here are the many challenges we face which may explain why others just don't bother:
1. Unless you do a ton of shipping, the major carriers (UPS/Fedex/DHL/Airborne) charge about $50 USD to send a 1 lb package to most countries. What customer is willing to pay this much for S&H?
2. The only reasonably cost effective method is US Air Mail. US Air Mail does not have reasonable insurance rates (At some point I looked into tracking and/or insurance, but this brings the cost closer to the UPS/Fedex rates).
3. International packages require filling out customs forms... BY HAND (USPS claims to be beta testing a way to print these by computer, but they have been claiming this for over a year now). This costs another few $bucks$ in time for an employee (incrasing the already high S&H costs for the customer)
4. Credit card fraud
About 90% of my incidents of credit card fraud come from International orders. This is not to imply that people outside of the US are more scrupulous than Americans. I would guess most countries have a similar rate of fraud; However when you commit inter-country fraud, it's nearly impossible to find and prosecute the criminal due to the sheer costs involved.
5. Credit card companies don't give a shit about fraud because they just make the vendor of the goods ("merchant") not only refund the money charged, but they also pay an extra $20 fee just for the "trouble" we made the credit card company go through in processing the fraud claim. In other words--ALL RISK of fraud is passed on to the vendor. One indicent of fraud costs you:
a. Lost goods
b. Lost $ from S&H
c. Charges from credit card company
d. Wasted time
Even if you could tell the credit card company every detail about the criminal (where they live, IP address, real name, etc..), it means nothing to them. Why should they bother to investigate it when they can just charge the merchant all of the costs of fraud? As you can see this is a broken system. There is currently a class action suit in progress against the credit cards surrounding this. And I hope they get sued up the ass for it.
6. Customs & import taxes Many customers will end up being charged an additional tax and/or their packages will be delayed for weeks OR MONTHS by customs. Invariably the customer thinks the vendor is at fault for this and should refund their money 100%. (Tip: Don't even bother shipping to Belgium--you'll be lucky if 1% of your packages get through)
7. Accounting and shipping software is not usually set up to handle International addresses. Every country has a different way of writing addresses. And most (reasonably priced) programs don't handle them well.
Overall, it's still worth it for us to ship overseas (i.e we make more money than we lose).. but there are many challenges and frustrations, so I can see why many vendors don't bother.
Jonah
www.streamzap.com
I think we can argue and say whatever we want, but the fact stays that a lot of people outside the US can't buy good from US online stores.
It has been said to get local resellers and it has been said to find alternatives for the goods. Sadly sometimes the US online stores are the only viable option (getting ThinkGeek's products may be harder if you try to hunt them down in a local online store in your country, and thinkgeek may not ship to your country or the specific product may not be exportable by the store. Apple has resellers in countries outside the US, so you can't buy in their webstore if you're outside the US, but your local webstore may be weeks or months behind the US store and may only sell localized products, not US or International versiones, etc.)
There are, nonetheless, options for people buying goods from online stores which act as intermediaries and buffers between the US online store and the foreign (to the US) customers.
I will try to summarize here the ones I know about, I ask of you to please share the ones you know, as I'm moving to Spain soon and the ones I use in Mexico will not work.
I have found three kinds of company that have these services:
1.-The forwarding postal address: These sites let you create a "real" postal address in a US city that you can use in your orders from any store. This will allow it to work for most checks for "locality" and even allows you to subscribe to magazines (which don't usually even send to postal boxes). They have their warehouses and charge you for the handling and the customs applying to your packages. They also let you group all your month's packages and send them over at month's end in one larger package to save on shipping. This is, to me, the best option.
I know of one site that uses this method which I use frequently and after using all the other methods I outline in this post I feel is the best approach:
Merkalink (works only for Mexico and I won't be able to use it in Spain when I move)
Skybox. I haven't used this service as I currently don't have use for it and to my knowledge is the only one that works with Europe in this category.
2.-The "proxy" store. A store will let you buy stuff which, in turn, they're buying from online stores. They give you a price quote and let you give them URLs for other products which in turn they include in their webstores, they usually have no warehouse of their own as they're just intermediaries. Encante (mexico only)
Dynamism
3.-The spyware approach: These are questionable products that sit on top of your web browser and actually hijack it in some cases, rewriting HTML on the fly and taking over your shopping experience. They're very close to spyware in their intrusiveness but, to my knowledge, they are not malicious nor is their intent to be. These actually sit in memory, on top of your web-shopping habits and when they detect you're in a store they support (say, amazon) you can see their buttons and banners in that page, which in turn pop-up their S&H + custom calculators and whatnot. Although original I don't like this approach very much (also because this approach means it only works in Windows, which I don't use)
DoUWantIt
(Irony: DoUWantIt only supports Windows, it says so in their help-desk FAQ page, in the paragraph that says they won't support macs -or Linux- right below the picture of the PowerMacintosh LC 5215 )
Now. I am sure there are others out there. I'm looking for gathering info like this (which I'm personally interested in, as I'd like to keep buying things when I move to Spain from the sites I'm buying things now). If you know of sites that do this not included here or categories I haven't thoug
Yeah, I can. I know where the European, mid-Eastern, Asian, African and latin American countries are too. OTOH, I know from doing business in every one of these continents except Africa that most OTHER people haven't a clue about the US. A recent article in a major periodical had a well-known European historian asserting, with a straight face, that years of living part time in New York City plus a visit or two to San Francisco meant he knew all that one really needs to know about the nature, attitudes and politics of Americans. Uh huh. You guys forget that most Americans have grandparents or great-grandparents that came here from SOMEWHERE ELSE. They spoke other languages, often in our memory, visited old friends and familyh, sometimes worshipped in interestingly styled buildings and generally, brought parts of the old culture and the old Country with them. I can and do make kipfil, pashka, pierogies, borscht, houlupki ... just to name the foods from my father's Ukrainian side of the family. We worshipped in a Ukrainian Orthodox church, where I not only followed the liturgy in the old language, I learned the conventions and meanings of the icons and the church architecture. When I visit my husband's grandmother Sigrid we eat her native Norwegian foods. My mother-in-law learned to make sauerbraten as a child, speaking German in the midWest. Can you make cole slaw, fried chicken, American-style apple pie? Until you can, you really have no basis to think that Americans are less cosmopolitan than you.
-- food is the first technology
A lot of companies/traders in US are interested only in the local US market - just because they have a website accessible to the outside (outside US) world doesn't mean that those ground rules have changed. Internet will not be of much help for sending goods outsided USA, coping with strange trade/customs laws of far away lands (far away from USA), strange restrictive trade practices and embargos by US government, ... I know this from my experience in talking to traders dealing in Amateur Radio equipment. A lot of them don't consider the risks involved in exporting stuff to outside US, worth taking.
There's another, almost niche problem, which I've seen in the US: When someone who lives/works in the US for some time or who lives near the border (in Canada or Mexico) and wants to receive some products in the US side, there are many websites which don't serve to those customers. In my case, I live near the US border with Mexico, and it's easier/cheaper for me to go pick them up and deal with the Custom taxes myself. I have a valid address in the US but my credit card is from México (a International VISA card). I have no problems dealing with Amazon, where I have bought many stuff, from books to electronics, toys, scanners, PC and related stuff, etc. No problem there. But when you go to other sites, most of them are not prepared to do the same.
;) )
The other night I was seeking for a notebook with special configuration (extra RAM, hard drive, batteries), and I can't buy it from the manufacturer, because it requires a US billing address. Other sites accepts charges but only thru $1500 USD, so most of the computers are out of the question. Also, there are some of these websites who don't accept PayPal if you are not from the US. Anyway, my "gripe" is with the Credit Cards.
Isn't the whole purpose of an "international VISA card" is to accept charges outside it's original country ? Another example, BestBuy, where I shop regularly when I visit the US. But try to shop online, and you can't do it. I can't even "register" in the physical store or do some kind of validation there. And I'm not alone here. there are many people who are in the same situation.
Some sites do some extra checking (faxing a copy of the CC mostly) which I mind, but if that's the only way to get some products, I'll do it.
In Canada, it's easier, but they have some similar problems with US sites. A Canadian friend of mine wanted to buy a Fujitsu laptop, but it seems he can't do it online in the US site. I don't remember the model but it was one not offered in Canada. He had to buy a different one, if I remember correctly.
Another example, a friend of mine currently working in the US, when he arrived he could not buy at several websites since his card wasn't from the US. He "got better", since he could get a US one after some weeks there. I wonder what happens when someone like him has to return to his country when the working visa (H-1B ?) expires. I think it's a better bet for these websites to accept International VISA's from Canada and Mexico.
Just some thoughts and a head's up to the people running sites in these situations.
BTW, the only time I've been falsely charged (from a Russian company), I gave the bank the information of the sites I was doing business with that card, and then I learned that these charges were already identified, and it was a "random" charge (which alarmed me more, mind you), not a security breach in one of the sites.
(Posted as an AC, since you don't know who might be reading this...
no text, biatch!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Why do US companies mostly sell in the US? Don't blame us, blame the archaic EU and their maze of rules to protect:
-consumers
-nationalized industries
-subsidized companies
Imagine if you were to do business in the US and each state had 12 specific rules when it comes to completing a sale via the web...you'd basically go for California and maybe another populous state and write off the rest.
We thought about doing this awhile back, and here are just a few of the reasons why we bagged it:
French servers needed to be physically located in France, as did Italian ones.
There are at least 3 different sets of laws that constrain a company when it comes to returns: Imagine you sell something, and after a while, the user wants their money back...and you're obliged to give it to them or face the wrath of their country's laws.
Shipping can be a serious pain in the ass. Imagine getting your computer and Hungarian customs has swiped a few discs.
The VAT. Add 17% to the price of everything.
The rules are 'changing' (some of the above may no longer be true) so as soon as you're compliant with 12 countries, 3 others change the rules to make it 'easier' for businesses.
The fact is, Europe knows this is holding them back, but there are so many protective clauses that will get politicians slaughtered if they are rolled back. Your friendly neighborhood Hungarian PC maker would be quite upset if you could order from Dell.com.
Don't get me wrong, I love Europe, loved living there, and would prefer it to 99.9% of the places in the states, but for better or worse, our culture is set up to get business moving: one dot-com, 300 million potential customers. Europe: one dot-com per country, 2-20 million potential customers.
It's not going to happen until these countries release their grips on tariff mentality.
There was a story on slashdot (too lazy to search for it, but someone probably remembers it) about someone who shipped a few thousand dollars worth of mac and PC equipment from Ontario to California. It arrived largely in pieces, with damage to cases, lost cables, boxes smashed open along the sides with holes that things fell out through, etc. It was the worst damage I'd seen done to a computer that wasn't intentional or fire damage, and UPS's attitude was basically 'Yeah, that's too bad, isn't it?'
Well, the consensus was that the guy had packed it improperly. He basically threw all the stuff in a big box so that they could smash up against eachother. Presumably a video game would be much safer, as it's mostly just some pamphlets, a CD, and air.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...now it's a first world country.
The first and second worlds are capitalist countries and communist countries, respectively, then developing countries make up the third...
Of course this definition of 'worlds' is fairly well regarded, though it has been disputed.
I use a US issued credit card and that still doesn't get me anywhere. ... :-)
I've read a few valid posts, but I feel a lot of those reasons can be circumvenced (wow, my spellchecker just exploded).
For instance, a voluntary registry system for people outside the US, for instance less payback guarantees for people outside the US, etc etc.
I wouldn't mind giving up some of my customer rights in exchange for a bit of convenience
Amazon is about the only site that lets me order books and DVD's. And Outpost lets me order *some* software.
That's already something, but I want more more more
I think, therefore I am...I think.
If you want a N.Y. Yankees cap, try the Manchester United website instead. They have cross-licensing for SWAG of the two of the biggest "sporting licensing properties" in the world. (One more reason for Bostonians to prefer Arsenal!)
If on the other hand you have the good taste to want something other than NY Yankees, I'm sorry to hear it that you can't get what you want. A sport that calls their finale the "World Series" ought to sell outside the NAFTA FTZ.
>
mod parent up
-Siggy!
Amazon.co.uk has some odd classifications with regards to countries, for instance it classifies Malta (soon to be a full EU member country) as outside Europe. Outside Europe???? And as a result they charge us more for postage and they got a bad rap about this from The Times of Malta. They do send books, videos and dvds at least.
When I checked with them, they told me it was due to Royal Mail and DHL. I checked with the websites of the latter two companies, and Malta is classified as being part of Europe, western europe even. I informed Amazon.co.uk, but they did nothing about it.
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Last time I checked I was using the WORLD Wide Web, and there seems little point wasting bandwidth to post your website to the world when only those living in the USA can buy and/or use the product.
Your telephone can call mine, too. That doesn't mean I have to do business with you. Get over it.
[nt]
I'm sure that if the US were to take over the world, everything, including global shipping, would be so much better...
I mean this, of course, in a humorous way, not a "were better than you" way...
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Isn't this what the rest of the posters are saying?
get your head out Moderator
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
And when are they switching to GB (their ISO country code), which is what the standards call for them to use?
Probably when Belfast starts answering to Dublin rather than to London. "UK" is officially short for "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
Will I retire or break 10K?
You will blow me.
Peace.
I live in Costa Rica, and purchase most of my tech stuff through the web (the markup in Costa Rica is just too high - imagine paying almost $350 for a $149 Nintendo Gamecube, and don't get me started on Apple Macs... they get up to $1000 markup.
As people have pointed out, they won't sell/ship/etc oversees, so here's what we do:
The big problem here is customs. If you order something and it gets ramdomly selected for customs inspection, you may expect to pay up to 80% taxes for some things - our little-minded goverment still thinks that a PDA, a notebook or a cell phone is a luxury item, and taxes it as such. Normally your packages will get through (they go after the big guys), though.
-.
It has to be said that there will be plenty of companys willing to ship computers to hungary. I can recommend MESH computers (I don't mean meshboxes - even though they are great) a very good manufacturer using reliable and compatible components - why go to DELL ? To be honest it does sound like you're upset because you can't buy american products - but there are european companys very willing to take your money !
I agree with some of your comments. However do not understand in the case of Dell who have a Hungarian site! I feel part of the problem is Europe and particularly the EC (Brussels) with all there rules about collecting VAT. This must make some american merchants question if it is worth doing business on the continent. Recently I was amazed at the number of US businesses that refused to ship a Garmin Etrex unit outside of N America. Another aspect of this problem is getting country specific items in other countries -i.e. in France try buying a UK or US keyboard. Another annoyance is the inability to use some country specific web sites in a different language (e.g. ebay.fr in English. Aspiring ebusinesses I believe need to recognise that the Web is worldwide and also that customers from any one country are likely not to be natives in that country. In my experience expats use the Web to trade as they are often happier with the ability to trade in a non pressured way where any language issues can be minimised (e.g. using Googles language tools).
I was traveling on business along the east coast last week and tried to use the hotel ethernet in my room to add some domestic flights to my schedule and found www.orbitz.com would not take my cards because they were out of country! Yea Orbitz you can't trust Diners Club and AMEX can you?
The BBC is an international organisation and the BBC.com website is their international site, and it's mostly american based anyway. When I, from a uk address, go to www.bbc.com, I get redirected to the .co.uk site. Isn't that what I was suggesting?
Bormio is a place in the italian alps, so yes it probably should have a .it address, I could have found it by looking on a map then. The fist thing I typed in was www.alps.it.
Bob's bread and Cheese shop doesn't sound like a national chain, so it could be under .wi.us, then when you order from it, you'll know where it's coming from.
The point I was making, only half-seriously, was that .com should probably be for international sites only, not that we should maintain the polluted namespace because it has become polluted.
Anti-americanism as a verb? Muy bueno.
To some degree, ignorance of geography is simply rational ignorance. In the vast majority of instances in which knowing the location of Hungary would be beneficial, an American will get a chance to consult a map first. Knowing it is Eastern-Europish will usually be sufficient.
On the other hand, I agree that the US educational system does a poor job with history and describing life outside the US. I wonder how many of my classmates even know what a value-added tax is.
However, there are many educational areas that could be improved. Should we teach more about global politics, or make sure students understand basic probability, statistics, and combinatorics? Probability and stats are probably more likely to be of discernable benefit to the students.
They don't want to be seen as "doing business in Hungary" because that way they would have to adhere to Hungarian law, and they probably don't want the extra expense of having a Hungarian-trained lawyer in house to vet all their practices. Pick up a book on International Trade Law, it's pretty complex stuff.
Maybe this is the chicken or the egg... Good luck charging your battery with the US 110V power supply that would have shipped with your mail-ordered laptop. Good luck getting the modem to work. Good luck playing your mail-ordered NTSC Region 1 DVDs on Pal Region 2 players.