iPod touch Purchasing Items on international Apple websites

I have been trying to purchase an iPod Touch on the Australian Apple website.

The process requires the purchaser to have only an Australian billing address.

This is insane, as I am trying to get this item as a gift to my brother in Australia. I do not know anyone else there who can buy it for me, so that I could transfer the money to that person for this purchase. Moreover, I do not want to buy the product here (in USA) and ship it out to Australia, for what may cost me almost half of the cost of the actual item itself.

However, in a general perspective this process does not make any sense to me, as I have made several purchases online and internationally that let me use my US-credit card.

I called up the Apple customer service, and they put me on hold for several minutes telling me that they are trying to get some supervisors on line. But the calls got disconnected after sometime. When I was able to get to talk to a CSR, she was saying its the company's policy.

This does not only pose a problem but also gives me a piece of thought on Apple's responsibility (read attitude) to its customers in such a situation as this.

Please let me know if anyone else has experienced a similar situation and if anyone can suggest me something about this.

thank you

gan6660 said:

Im an ebay seller and i sold a wii fit to a guy in Australia and shipped it USPS Priority and it got there in 3 days just fine and it cost $50 so a small ipod would cost maybe $15 so why not buy it here and shipp it there?

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kwk1 said:

Yeah, good idea.
Buy it locally and have it shipped to Australia.

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thank you, gan6660 and kwk1.

I was not sure of shipping costs to send this item from US to AUS, and so was concerned with this problem.

Looks like the shipping costs may not be as expensive as I thought. I will look up for the costs and figure this out.

But I still think that it makes sense for Apple to let users use their US-credit cards on its international websites too.

I hope someone from Apple is listening!

kwk1 said:

I understand your frustration with credit cards from a different country.

I've tried to buy things from Walmart.com and have them shipped to a store so I could pick up there. They won't do it cause I live in Canada with a Canadian address on my Credit card. Pretty much all the Brick and Mortar stores operate this way. But yet I can go to a Walmart in the States and buy something with my Canadian credit card.

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yeah, but the point that i was driving to was to make the same thing possible in the online sales too.

and i did not find any sense in this policy of Apple because i was not trying to buy the product in the Australian website and having it shipped to another country. Or may be in different situation like buying the iPod touch in the US website and having Apple shipped it out to AUS, considering the fact that it is cheaper in the US. i was not exploiting their flexibility.

i was just asking them to make it more sensible.