Not really. Most of that stuff is commonsense anyway. People in Australia know you can’t buy tobacco of eBay and get it shipped to you
I speak from personal experience when I tell you that it is entirely possible to legally import firearms and parts thereof into Australia.
None of it strikes me as being especially likely for a layperson- in Australia- to be purchasing.
No they wouldn’t. Customs don’t actually care about people sending souvenir T-shirts to other people. It’s one of those things that’s on a list somewhere for adding to other things someone has done wrong (“A-ha! Gotcha trying to sneak those Tiger Penis pills into Australia, along with a hat made from Lemur fur and… what’s this? An Australian Flag T-Shirt? I’m afraid you’ll need to accompany us to the interview room for a thorough cavity search.”)
I still think it depends what you’re shipping. It’s not hard to mail books and DVDs internationally.
Their statement, whether intentionally or not, suggested that anywhere outside of North America was so prone to financial fraud as to not be worth encountering.
BBBBTW, the owners of the site in the OP don’t seem to even have realised that it’s not necessary to steal a card to steal the card details.
Perhaps so. But perhaps it’s the truth for them. I see no problem with a company charging extra handling fees or not shipping at all to any country they don’t want to ship to if they’re feeling it’s not in their business interests. If they’re just being stupid, well, it’s their monetary loss. Once again, what’s the problem? A business is not required to serve everyone.
And, yes, I have been on the other side of this before. I lived in Europe for 5 years. There was plenty of stuff I couldn’t get shipped to me out there. It never occurred to me to be angry at the company. Once again, if they decided not to ship out here, I could do my best to find a competitor that did. If nobody did, well, that’s my tough luck.
Saying (or implying) that anywhere outside the five-figure zip codes is just full of guys hoping to use those stolen card details, however, is insulting.
I suppose. I think you’re reading way to much into it.
However, my pet peeve is reserved for places that do business internationally, yet have outdated forms that require you to enter a State and 5 digit zip code before the application can process your data.
I had one German website tell me that my ‘address code’ was incorrect because it had seven characters. Given that this was a music publisher not renowned for their accuracy (I’ll give you three guesses), it didn’t come as a complete surprise.
My favourite was the site which scolded me, via a popup window, for not entering a valid ‘zip’, and informing me that had I entered my country (later on in the form), this scolding would not have occurred. My head hurt.
Wow! At first, I didn’t think there was any substance to your rant, but now that you’ve substituted the name of one country with the name of another, you’ve really brought home the terrible injustice of it all!
Look, folks, this is not a difficult scenario to understand. Fraud is an issue in every part of the world, and it always eats into a company’s profits. For this company, the cost of dealing with fraud in Europe is higher than the potential profits available in that market. In the US and Canada, the market is big enough to make the business profitable in spite of the fraud. That’s it. Stop taking it personally. No one is obligated to sell anything to you, and their inability to turn a profit in your specific market is not a personal insult.
We are an international company. I talk every day to people in Japan, Qatar, Australia, Germany, et cetera. One of our biggest customers is in the UAE.
But in order to deal with anyone overseas and anyone who orders our stuff online, we require physical proof that they are who they say they are. This usually takes the form of a photocopy of both sides of some form of identification (driver’s license, etc) and both sides of their credit card. Yes, it’s still possible to get hit by fraud this way, but the hassle and the procedure cut down on it severely.
The reason for being concerned for overseas fraud is really incredibly simple. It’s not that people from Bulgaria or Mongolia or even Germany are more likely to be fraudsters. It’s that if they’re in the US we can contact the FBI. It’s harder when they’re in Canada or Mexico but when you’re dealing with a $20 T-shirt it’s a hell of a lot more trouble than it’s worth to go after someone in Romania.
And why an international band of credit card thieves might try to purchase a $20 T-shirt they don’t want? Again, simple. It’s an inexpensive transaction – a test charge. The only problem with T-shirts is that you have to have a physical address to ship to; that’s why fraudsters like to go for more ephemeral transactions like web hosting.
It does suck, and if those two guys really want to do business overseas they have the option of going through what my company does. Realize that we spend several hours a day doing this. That they’re going to have to set up a fax machine to run all day long, which means that either they get some good e-fax software (which costs money) or have a spare phone line perpetually tied up (which also costs money, and I suspect they’ll need that anyway.) And then there’s going through the process of emailing every one of their overseas customers exactly what they need (and probably getting told What? SCREW YOU by people who frankly don’t want a $20 t-shirt enough to FAX someone their identification and their credit card). And then there’s setting those T-shirts aside for the separate packaging and taking them to the post office specially and waiting in line and getting them weighed and filling out the customs paperwork…
…and it just isn’t worth it for a small operation if they have an increased risk of credit card fraud that they can’t do a thing about.
Thanks Little Plastic Ninja. Although I was not personally aware of the issues involved, it took a full 2 minutes of googling to see much of this same information. I was about to post links so GorillaMan would understand, but no need now.
Note to GorillaMan: There is an enourmous amount of information on the internet and can be found pretty easily using google and other search engines.
I just wanted to add a tiny bit to this discussion in that some countries have odd restrictions on things being imported. I was selling cosplay parts on ebay and I was happy to try sending anywhere on earth but I always checked with the Post Office before agreeing to any transaction.
Know what? You can’t export any finished clothing to Italy from the US.
It’s not the same as the potential fraud rant ongoing here, but I’m sure the others working in overseas shipping could relate.
The US-only-zipcode-and-US-only-states-and-no-country field thing was virtually universal a few years ago, but I have to admit it’s getting better.
Current hate is: I got used to the sites that only accepted CCs on a US bank, so I got one. So then it was only accepting CCs on a US bank and with a US address for delivery. So I got one. Then the cunning buggers shifted to only accepting CCs on a US bank and with a US address for delivery and only a US address on the account to which the CC was attached. I officially gave up on that site then.
But the prize undoubtedly went to a shareware computer game that I liked. Now this guy was a real specimen; he required you to get a new authentication code every single time you reinstalled his game - whether due to hard disk dying, kid deleting the game, buying a new PC, anything - at a cost of IIRC $US10. Except it was $US11 for me because he charged 10% extra for all orders for outside the US “due to the extra cost of foreign transactions”. This from a guy whose total business was online; you paid on his site and got delivery by download. I took him to task for this, and he said “well lobby your government to remove all import tariffs”. He seemed blithely unaware that the US has far more restrictive import restrictions and tarriffs than my country does: I should have been charging him 10%. Eventually I got sick of the soaking, no game was worth that much.