Hello guys, why do these popular online store brands only ship to a few countries instead of shipping worldwide :

www.shopadidas.com
http://www.burberryusaonline.com/
http://www.nike.com/index.jhtml?l=nikestore,home

Also, why do they make different websites for the different countries?

I'm guessing that it's due to fraud, and the cost of shipping (hidden brokerage fees). You can always get a mailbox in the US with some ID, and have them remail it to you.

Kev, I plan to sell worldwide on my ecommerce site. How can I prevent fraud or minimize it? Thanks buddy.

Fraud for the most part. Here in the United States, kids have been killed over a pair of sneakers. These brands have identified certain countries that tend to have a high amount of fraud.

Some of the high risk countries
Bulgaria (BG)
Cameroon (CM)
Egypt (EG)
Gambia (GM)
Ghana (GH)
Indonesia (ID)
Iran (IR)
Israel (IL)
Lithuania (LT)
Malaysia (MY)
Morocco (MA)
Nigeria (NG)
Pakistan (PK)
Romania (RO)
Russia (RU)
Turkey (TR)
Ukraine (UA)
Vietnam (VN)
Yugoslavia (YU)
Now of course this list is not complete and it does not say anything bout all the citizens of these countries. Unfortunately a lot of the orders placed by people in these countries have been fraudulent and some companies will not do business with anyone from these countries.

Of course, we probably all have done business in one way or another with some citizens from the above countries and those transactions have been successful.

There are many ways to help prevent fraud. The basic one is to start off with Address Verification Services. If the AVS does not match, this transaction should go into more screening.

Payer Authentication (Verified by Visa (VBV) / MasterCard SecureCode (MSC) would help to prevent some "I didn't do it transactions" based on the location of the consumer.

Geolocation / IP logging which can help you look at the buyer's IP address to see if it matches where they say they are. For example, I am in Colorado. But if I buy something from you and my IP is coming from Florida, hopefully you will take a closer look at this transaction. Unfortunately some ISPs don't support this and you will need to identify these.

There is also lists like a negative list that will help you see if that consumer has a propensity to do a chargeback. If so, you might think twice about completing the order.

There is also things like order velocity monitoring as well. And of course phone verification and manual verification.

Corey, do you think if I use WorldPay it will be secure?

I have never used WorldPay as a merchant - only as a consumer. WorldPay offers a variety of services, some of which may benefit you. WorldPay will be secure - in that the buyer is usually sent over to a WorldPay's secure processing page to complete the transaction.

This helps the merchant in that everything is handled on WorldPay's site so any compromise would be WorldPay's issue, not the merchant. This hurts the merchant in that the checkout process is broken since it is not a seamless checkout process. The buyer is re-directed over to a page that is probably nothing like the catalog.

So you have pros and cons. I can't say don't use them and I can't say use them (since I never used them as a merchant), but they have been around for awhile and are sometimes cheaper and easier to set up for some merchants who are not in the United States.

I would recommend Maxmind for GeoIP.

May be because they may not have enough customers to start serving in that particular country. ALso because (as mentioned above) there are some high risk countries that are identified by the seller.

I wonder about how much profits does www.shopadidas.com make per month.

Is WorldPay + PayPal standard the best payment methods a merchant from Singapore can use? My customers will be worldwide - I think most will be from the USA, Canada and Europe though.

Thanks for your advices, I appreciate all your thoughts and comments.

Probably due to the contracts they made with local distributor companies.

Say, Adidas Japan, has their own office and staff, which is more expensive than US (salary, rent, tax, running expenses etc.). Therefore they have more expensive price tag than US for same products. If Adidas US ships to Japan, no one will buy from Adidas Japan.

Burak, that was what I was thinking too. I guess it's one of the reasons!