Digital (Shopping) Divide: setting policy based on where traffic originates

[mandy]

Lim lives in Singapore with his wife and a son who happens to have very wide feet. Wide shoes are hard to find in Singapore, so Lim’s wife decided to shop for them on U.S. websites. There was just one problem: No one would sell her the shoes. American retailers don’t like to take credit cards from other countries; they don’t like to ship things overseas; and they especially don’t like to do business with customers whose IP addresses place them in parts of the world with a high incidence of fraud—like Singapore.

With increasing frequency, I see studies pinpointing “bad” neighborhoods on the Internet, supposed hotbeds of hacking and fraud, viruses and spam. South Korea, Romania, Lithuania, Nigeria—they all get fingered. ... Businesses need to protect themselves from fraud, and retailers certainly have the right to choose not to ship to certain countries—or even to any countries except their own.

But it might not take long to get from here (no shoes to Singapore) to there (no Web traffic from Singapore)...

full article: http://www2.cio.com/research/security/ed...02005.html

[Nat]

American retailers don’t like to take credit cards from other countries; they don’t like to ship things overseas

I just did an advanced search on eBay for "wide shoes" since they are looking for wide shoes for male and female and I told it to search all autions that ship to All Countries and I found many auctions from that USA listed that will ship overseas.

That article seems to be insinuating that all americans won't ship overseas?  That's very untrue, there are many that ship worldwide.  It sounds like someone just isn't looking very hard because I found plenty within a couple of minutes.