On more than one occasion, I have hit up against the hard rock of my parents wanting to buy me a present from a multinational company, and being unable to.
Lush Cosmetics is one of the places who have products that I adore. (I see that their site has been hacked. Oops). My mom tried to order me a gift basket from them a couple of years ago. When she got to the checkout, she went to put in her billing details, but it wouldn't let her use a non-NZ address. Their answer: You just can't.
Apple is the other one. My dad wanted to buy me an iPad last year for my birthday*. No amount of permutations or combinations would allo him to actually purchase me one on his credit card. I called customer service, and the guy I spoke to didn't think it would be a problem, until he actually tried it. Total fail. In the end, my dad transferred the money to me and I ordered it. Pain in the ass, and ruins any surprise there might have been.
I was browsing the easter sale on the Kathmandu web site, and looked to see if they have the same problem. They do. Why? I'd love to be able to say to my parents that Kathmandu gift certificates would be an awesome present (they would). But they can't order them.
I'm limited to Amazon to be able to provide them with an easy place to get me a gift cert. Curiously, I have ordered gift certificates from a Canadian book retailer for my sisters using my NZ credit card without any trouble. On my first order on the card, they contacted me for further verification details and then, no problems.
Maybe I'm missing something. Is there a reason why retailers in NZ don't / won't allow out of country people to order from their site? I've got to think that there would be a good market for such a thing given the number of migrants in this country? If you know of a company that does allow out of country buyers to ship internally, please let me know! I'm happy to reward them with purchases. :)
* Yes, I am spoiled. I'm comfortable with that.
4 comments:
From my experience doing CC processing it's because a multicurrency merchant account costs a lot more than a single currency one. Currency exchange is risky, and as the CC providers handle it all themselves they charge for this risk.
That was in 2005 though, things may have changed.
But then how can they take foreign credit cards at POS? Same deal. Who cares where in the world I'm shopping from. If I'm willing to shop in NZD, what's it to a merchant where my cc bill goes?
I have the same problem with Trademe which i love using because its just so much easier than eBay which is a dog! The problem is they won't do Paypal, I can't pay with direct debit to a foreign account, and I had issues with using my credit card. It was going to cost me $40 to transfer a small sum of money for an auction to NZ - which was ridiculous! I ended up getting an NZ friend to pay, then posting the money via snail mail! It was a real hassle. It's such a shame because they seem to be losing the advantage of doing business on the internet - the fact that you should be able to do it from anywhere, and its irrelevant where the site actually is. With some of the larger multinationals though - i think they do it purposely so they can control the pricing in particularly regions. I have heard of one company purposely restricting its retailers from being able to sell to the southern hemisphere so they can control the pricing and protect their regional markets from selling cheaply to us - especially when our currency is so high against the US at present.
This is a question I can answer! Simple answer is risk of chargebacks and fraud. So many NZ retailers and traders have been burned by people issuing chargebacks on their credit cards citing stolen details MONTHS down the track, and often from US or Australian 'addresses', that now they just don't bother taking the risk.
Even if you're using paypal (which tries to track potential fraudsters), you are still risking an expensive lesson.
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