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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."
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
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).
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
And FedEx/UPS/DHL do operate in most areas, even outside industrial world.
It is my understanding based on information from the mid 90's that DHL operates in those countries with a very large internal blacklist, and hired a company to go and do a physical address survey in areas well known for fraud. Something on the order of 90% of shipments to certain third world nations were fraud, and 50-60% in eastern bloc countries for non B2B shipments. Fraud for B2B was still high in parts of Africa.
I would not be surprised at all if FedEx and UPS and other international shipping companies have experienced similar problems.
You can't really blame a lot of businesses for not being willing to take the risk. If you are selling laptops and making $100 a piece on them, losing 6 out of 10 you ship will put you out of business in a hurry.
The only suggestion I have for you is to call the merchant and arrange for a B2B style delivery. Reluctant merchants are far more likely to ship to a business they can look up and verify exist than a private address.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
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.
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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
Fraud is a small part, and even with cash theses companies will not sell to you.
The main reason comes because of taxes, warrenties,customs,shipping and other legal problems.
It costs alot of money to make sure that the company complies with all of theses and until a the time a company sees they can profit they are not going to spend the time and money to sell in theses countries.
Until then ship the product to somone you know in the US and then have them ship it to you. That way the person shipping to you has to deal with customs and all that mess.
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...
Sure it's not the distances but the number of transfers which are involved. Put a package on a Jumbo in Sydney and it will still be on that plane when it lands in London. The times when the package is likely to go missing are Sydney (it doesn't get on the plane) or London (it gets off but disappears in Heathrow somewhere).
The are 60 million people in the UK. That's an awful lot of homes. If you're sending packages from the suburbs of London to the suburbs of Glasgow at a minimum it will go from local post-office, to local sorting office, to regional sorting office, to airport, to plane, from plane, to airport, to regional sorting office, to recipient, say. That's many places where it could go missing. The major distance (London to Glasgow) isn't an issue here. That could be 400 miles, it could be 4000 miles.
There is an issue with the reliability of the packages arm of the post office, Parcel Farce. They aren't very good. But the private carriers are generally fine. I can have a friend from Arizona send me a harddrive and it turn up on my door step two days later.
But as others say in the end it's down to the effort the suppliers want to make. You could either use a better carrier, insure against potential fraud (Western Europe is not the third world and our crime is no worse than the US and in some areas a lot better), carry out better checks. Add a premium to the sales price to cover these.
We're a big market. Scandinavia, Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy is a hell of a lot of population (between 400 million and 0.5 billion people). It must be worth their while to sell to us. If they don't we'll look elsewhere.
FYI, the USPS has always been independent. Without going into too much detail, it operates as an independent government corporation, similar to the FDIC, Amtrak, and Fannie Mae. I'm personally a huge fan of the USPS, but they are far from profitable. Just check out this testimony from the GAO (and various other reports by the same organization). Alternatively, hit Google with "Postal Transformation" and see what it gives you. The only problem is that the USPS is constitutionally guaranteed. That's right. You have the constitutional right to send mail in the US.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
The reason is because you have a ton of countries all with unique shipping requirements and laws and blah blah...but the USA has good customers and it is all uniform. You can us the US Postal service, or UPS and you know it will be easy. For example if I have a customer doing a website and they inquire about shipping internationally, I have to tell them....well how much are you going to charge? They don't know because each country is different, whereas the USA is the USA and they know what to charge. I had a customer who did international shipping and got burned on a sale to New Zealand - her shipping to N.Z. made it not worth even selling. And yes there is a lot of fraud in Moldavia and places like that. It's too bad the crooks are ruining the repuation of their whole country.
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Technically, we are beyond survival.
A lot of big companies keep their markets quite seperate. What do you think the whole region encoding on DVDs was about? They try to maximise their profits, which in some instances might mean different pricing levels or different release dates in different markets.
These companies don't only frown on grey market imports, they do everything in their power to stop them. Particularly bad are car manufaturers (ridiculous price differences for the same thing even inside Europe, very restrictive sales practices to "authorised dealers" etc) and clothing/shoes people (I seem to remember Reebok stopping supermarkets in Germany from re-importing from China, as it would "dilute their brand" or something).
Anyway, the big companies want globalisation, have factories where the work is cheapest etc. Lawmakers should make sure that individuals have the same capabilities, and for instance make things like "region encoding" illegal.
Ponxx
What I do is if the order is from outside the U.S. *OR* from inside the U.S. but uses a free-email account as a contact, or there is any question about the validity of the order, an email is sent to the customer asking them to fax a copy of the image of both sides of their credit card along with their signature and a note of the amount to charge. If it is charged back that gives me some documentation to dispute the chargeback with Visa/MC.
Of course, American Express is an entirely different set of nonsense. If you do more than 50% of your business on the Internet AMEX puts you on a "Full Recourse" plan which basically means any chargeback against you CANNOT be disputed, even if you have the above documentation. It's basically a cop-out on the part of AMEX in its duty to do a good-faith investigation into a chargeback. Basically, if the customer disputes the charge you're screwed. For that reason, our company will not accept AMEX orders over $50--which kind of defeats the purpose of accepting American Express. But I happily tell my customers to just use Visa or Mastercard instead. Seems AMEX is shooting itself in the foot.
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.
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.
I totally agree that AMEX's policy is very vendor un-friendly-- problem is, the internet's a big place, and when online you're usually buying a commodity that can be bought elsewhere. And from a customer's standpoint, I'm not as much worried about other customers defrauding the supplier (though I probably should be, to keep costs down). I'm far more worried about suppliers/whomever defrauding me, selling my info, or "losing" it. So if a merchant won't take my 1-time AMEX number (generated by the handy-dandy smartcard reader on my desk, and fraud-proof since it's only good for one transaction), I'll try to find another merchant who will. My real number doesn't end up in anybody's database, to be snarfed at random when they forget to secure their machines.
I've never had to deal with an ID-theft or fraud (knocks on wood). My GF has, and it was absolute hell. She now gets a phone contact any time her credit gets run, on the assumption it's a fraud. From my point of view, preventing this makes going to a little extra bit of trouble, finding alternate vendors, whatever, very much worth the small amount of extra time. Just my $0.02
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