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

Comments

[geminigirl]

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

[hobbitbabe]

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]

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.