Shopping Online

Courier companies in Bermuda are reporting a massive boom in business over the Christmas period.

I'm not surprised. Given the high cost of local goods and the ease of shopping online, more and more people are relying on the courier services to bring their purchases into Bermuda. It's a trend exacerbated by the fact that many American companies won't ship outside the United States. To get around this the courier companies such as ZipX and BEST Express do a booming business in supplying US forwarding addresses. The idea is that you use that address when buying from an online retailer and the courier forwards the package on to Bermuda when it arrives (charging a hefty premium for doing so).

I still haven't figured out any rules for what can and can't be shipped direct to Bermuda and why some companies will do it and others won't. Amazon.com will happily send books, CDs and DVDs by air mail to Bermuda, but computer games are a no-no (Amazon.co.uk won't ship them outside the UK either). The digital camera and iPod we recently bought from PC Connection had to come to Bermuda via a ZipX box and Pottery Barn wouldn't ship outside the US at all unless we called them on the phone to place the order.

Some companies are even worse, required that the goods be paid for by a credit card with an American billing address. Apple's iTunes music store is a great idea ruined for anyone outside the US by this limitation, and many of the satellite radio station systems you can get in Bermuda also require this. We ran into the same problem when trying to buy a wedding present for some friends earlier this year - although they all have online shopping sites we couldn't order online from Dillards, Williams Sonoma or Bed Bath and Beyond using our UK credit card. Again, we had to ring them up to place the order.

What I don't understand is if I can buy books from Amazon.com with a non-American card, why not from every other major American store too? And if Dillards can verify my credit card when I supply them the details over the phone, why can't they do it when I supply them over the Internet? And I thought American stores were supposed to have good customer service.

If someone knows the reason for all these restrictions I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, the profits at those courier companies will just keep going up and up.

Comments

[Box on 30.12.03 at 10:48]

I think with Amazon in particular, they broker some goods out to other companies. If you order a camera from Amazon, it may actually come from another company who might have different shipping rules. Each company has their own policies in this regard. Some companies thrive on exporting goods (www.110220volts.com).

This situation got a whole lot worse after 11/9 when the US seemed to clamp up on sending anything out of the country.

Incidentally, you can have your zipx address put on to your easylink card to ease the VISA AUTH problems caused by non-US cards.

I must agree that the zipx charges are scandalous and the service is either amazingly good or utterly shite.

[Christian Dunleavy on 30.12.03 at 11:54]

I asked a relative who worked for Mastercard this question awhile ago and apparently the US billing address is primarily a credit protection for the company.

A company has a much harder time collecting if, for example, you were to receive the product and then dispute the charge if you are out of the country. They might not get the product back or get paid because they are out of their jurisdiction. They tend to err on the side of caution and accept only domestic cards.

With regards to software/electronics, I'm pretty sure that the US in particular has restrictions on the export of these products because of encryption rules. Supposedly these prevent 'evil doers' from being able to communicate securely etc and avoid detection. You don't know what that IPOD can really do!

[Eric on 31.12.03 at 02:03]

Having worked one various e-commerce projects, I know firsthand that nearly all of the credit card fraud in the US (at least in online purchases) stems from outside of the US.

In 2000-2001, nearly all cc theft online came out of what was the Soviet Union - they have little to no laws governing global commerce over there. China was a growing issue and is currently a huge one. (any country with a large population and lack of legal structure to deal with the matters is going to be an issue)

More recently, there has been growing hostility towards offshore jurisdictions due to the 9/11 (or 11/9, whichever way you view dates) hype that terrorists were laundering money through off shore accounts.

I have never had an easy transaction when buying anything online ever since moving here from the US. I used to buy literally every single thing I owned online (or at least research it in the case of my car). So this has been a bit of a disappointment for me.
Even when I wanted to buy a computer for my father from a US based company and have it shipped in the US, the fact that I have a Bermuda residence as the main residence on my credit card caused me to have to make 15 calls over a period of 7 days to finally get the thing processed.
When I bought my Apple laptop and wanted to get it here, I finally had to resort to having it shipped to an address in NYC and then have someone bring it in for me when they travelled on business.

A large part of the hassle involved is that in terms of what the US as a whole thinks, Bermuda is in the Caribbean - and that is where they have some restrictions on cc processing in place in terms of fraud.
And like Christian said - a lot of software and computer stuff can't be shipped due to sweeping agreements made by the companies involved - encryption being considered a munition is part of the problem - but in general it can be attributed to the fact that the people in charge of making those laws don't know enough about software/hardware and are therefore reacting scared to a situation that makes it harder for people that aren't doing anything wrong, and not any harder for people that want to do bad things.