The world is smaller than you think.

[baratron]

Today I am Unimpressed with Threadless.com. Having spent a while on their site choosing stuff, I've come to pay for my order and discovered that it is not possible for me to buy things for someone who lives in another country to me.

Can shipping and billing addresses be different?
As long as the billing and shipping addresses are in the same country, you can use different billing and shipping addresses.

Now, this just seems bizarre. I can only assume it's some sort of fraud prevention thing, but... for the size of order we're talking about, I can't see why it's necessary. I mean, let's go on a t-shirt buying spree with a stolen credit card! Doesn't quite work, does it?

In this internet age tons of people have friends who live in different countries to themselves. It seems absolutely ridiculous for me to have to wait two weeks to receive a t-shirt in the UK, pay huge customs charges (the borderline here is so low - £18 iirc - that sometimes even one t-shirt can make you have to pay charges. I don't mind the % duty so much, but it's the £8/£9/£10 fixed fee "handling charge" that kills me, often doubling the cost of the order when postage is also considered), only to have to send it straight back to the US, taking another two weeks before it gets to my friend!

And it's just not the same if I PayPal over the amount of money to my friend and get him to buy his own present...

Comments

[geminigirl]

If the person is in the US, I'm sure we can take care of it for you.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

And if you have Canadian friends, I'm your man.

That is a CRAZY rule. I have encountered it when trying to buy something for my sister in the USA, but also when trying to simplify the border/shipping issues by sending stuff my sister and then collecting it when I visit. The worst was when I did a whole eBay auction and then didn't find out until afterwards that they wouldn't ship to a different address and I was stuck paying their outrageous international rates.

[geminigirl]

Ugh. The Customs charges....it's often cheaper for us to pay shipping twice (once to my sister in law and one from her to me) than it is to have Canadian companies ship to us in the US.

[hiddenpaw.livejournal.com]

I suspect it may make the question of tax to complex for the shopping cart in question to work out. I would imagine most shopping carts are programed to work out tax based on the billing address, but if shipping address is different to the billing address it has to work out what taxes are due from where which I imagine is not entirely they a strait forward question. I imagine programmers are praying no governments start pondering who is due what tax if somebody sits in one country and orders an item from a second country to be delivered to a third country using a billing address from a fourth.