For just over a week now I've been trying to figure out a way to accomplish a seemingly trivial task, namely to purchase an HP TouchPad. This has so far proven to be beyond my abilities, and not only because of the high demand and the low availability (particularly in Europe). Turns out ordering things from the US is an unbelievable chore for international customers, when it's possible at all.
Most of you are US residents, so perhaps you were not aware of this problem. Do you know what international customers, eg. in Sweden, may have to wrangle with in order to make a simple purchase from an American store (even a virtual one eg. the Kindle bookstore, or Amazon app-store), or to access an American service such as pandora.com?
Here's a selection: mail forwarding services (fails much of the time due to mismatch between billing and shipping addresses as well as an aversion towards mail forwarders on the part of several stores); concierge shopping; virtual American debit card eg. via usunlocked.com (if you're comfortable giving them all the info they need to create a card for you, it's great. I got incredibly nervous after having started the process and aborted it); juggling paypal accounts (slim chance); IP trickery along the lines of Tor or hotspot shield; chaining payment methods using gift-certificates. I may have missed a few.
I find this astonishing. It's not my evil socialist mercantilist govt. that's stopping me. I'm not trying to get something for free. I'm not even trying to get anything cheaper by turning to US stores (rather, I'm just trying to get something that they haven't seen fit to launch abroad). Online shopping is nowhere near as awesome as I expected it would be. I thought it would be easier than this to exchange money for trinkets.