US versus UK dowload purchase

iwb

I just went to purchase a piece of software over the net. I love this way of getting my software. I went to the US site, not knowing of a UK site. I did the needful and upon clicking checkout, I was informed that I wouldn't be allowed to download it if purchased from the US site. I would get the boxed disk and have to pay shipping to Ireland also and any taxes and duties. It was priced at $99.99US to download.
Anyone know what that would come to landed in Ireland?
There was also an option to redirect my purchase to the UK site which I clicked. It is a great facility as all my details stayed and I was about to purchase the download when I noticed the price was now 99.99 sterling. Holy sh1t! Is there any way this can be justified for a download? I refuse to participate in this ripoff. I will get someone in Canada to buy for me and grab it from them. It will cost me a few euro to send them the money but it will still cost less than €100 all told.

Genghis

I recently tried to buy an e-book from Amazon. I priced it on Amazon.com. .de and .co.uk. It was not available on de., and about 40% more expensive on .co.uk (allowing for conversion to €, etc).

Naturally I ordered through Amazon.com, but because they knew I wasn't in the US they couldn't sell it to me. I was forced to go through .co.uk for the same item, at the inflated cost. In fairness I think it was the publisher / not amazon who made the condition, but it sure stank for me.

Pity I didn't know anyone in the states with a webmail address who could have bought it for me. Why are you sending them the money - would you not just given them your credit card details?

iwb

I think you misread my post somewhat. I am going to get someone in Canada to use their credit card and get it for $99.99. I will then send them the money to reimburse them. If I give the US site my credit card details to pay, my address has to accompany it so it is obvious I am not in north america.
I actually have a north american credit card and bank account but the billing address in Ireland so I am still shafted.

Ripwave

Originally posted by iwb
I just went to purchase a piece of software over the net. I love this way of getting my software. I went to the US site, not knowing of a UK site. I did the needful and upon clicking checkout, I was informed that I wouldn't be allowed to download it if purchased from the US site. I would get the boxed disk and have to pay shipping to Ireland also and any taxes and duties. It was priced at $99.99US to download.
Anyone know what that would come to landed in Ireland?
There was also an option to redirect my purchase to the UK site which I clicked. It is a great facility as all my details stayed and I was about to purchase the download when I noticed the price was now 99.99 sterling. Holy sh1t! Is there any way this can be justified for a download? I refuse to participate in this ripoff. I will get someone in Canada to buy for me and grab it from them. It will cost me a few euro to send them the money but it will still cost less than €100 all told.

The US still restricts exports of some types of encryption. It's not unusual to find freeware applications where most of the code is available on servers in the US, but the encryption binaries have to be downloaded from servers in Europe.

(For example, Info-Zip).

Of course, if that was the case, they shouldn't be offering to sell you the boxed set either.

Genghis

I didn't realise that your credit card identified your address (and I am not actually sure it did - perhpas you entered your address somewhere on the purchase form yourself / on a previous purchase, and it was this that flagged you as not being in the US).

I know that when I worked for Ticketmaster they made a big deal out of their policy to only be able to send tickets to the billing address of the cardholder, but in reality they could never access / share this data from the bank, so they relied on what the caller told them was the address. i.e. I would have to ask a caller what the registered billing address of the cardholder was, and then refuse any request to send the tickets elsewhere. However in practice if the person lied and gave the address they wanted the tickets sent to instead of the cardholders billing address in the first place, then that is where they would be sent.

AFAIK when vendors request payment on a card, they are only told whether a credit card has available funds, and whether it is valid (not stolen, lost, etc). It is a simple yes / qualified no response.

iwb

That's interesting. I might try that the next time. I have someone purchasing it for me now.
I'd still like to know what justifies the huge difference in cost.

maxheadroom

Originally posted by Genghis
AFAIK when vendors request payment on a card, they are only told whether a credit card has available funds, and whether it is valid (not stolen, lost, etc). It is a simple yes / qualified no response.

Vendors can also run an address check, where they read out the address given to them and ask that it be checked against the registered billing address. Again, they get a yes / no answer, and they are not told which part of the address has failed. Many online and mail order companies use this as an extra form of fraud protection (Dell and play.com come to mind immediately).

spongebob

Dell have a bunch of thick skangers working in their CC processing as it happens, if there is a comma out of place in a name and address then God help you.

M

maxheadroom

Originally posted by Muck
Dell have a bunch of thick skangers working in their CC processing as it happens, if there is a comma out of place in a name and address then God help you.

Its not actually their fault, because the CC auth centre (run by some bank, I'm not sure who Dell use) just says yes or no, they don't say where the problem is... Most of the time, the problem is caused by trying to fit Irish addresses into a system designed for British ones...

dudara

I once had my credit card rejected by Crucial because of a mistake in the billing address. Again it was the problem of fitting an irish address into an english system