Online shopping

[BillB]

Beware of the "lack of place" of the internet. I dutifully paid for my license to AVG Antivirus (http://grisoft.com/doc/146/lng/us/tpl/tpl01) and the credit card came back with a 2% "Foreign Country Fee".

The details:

grisoft.com is already populated with a United States locality and all prices are denominated in dollars. Although there is a disclaimer that "VAT taxes will be added where applicable," there is no other indication as to where the transaction may be cleared.

Worse than that, the credit card I used was issued by a unit of Britain-based Barclay's bank -- a USAirways / Juniper Bank credit card. To add further insult; as a travel-affiliated card one would expect them to have particularly liberal terms for international jet-setters.

Moral of this debacle:

Know your vendor when shopping online and know the terms of your credit card.

Don't use your USAirways card for anything more sophisticated than tickets and groceries.

[BillB]

More details?
 
My experience has been that any purchases cleared through a foreign site on a US card result in service charges.  If you choose your card carefully, you may only have a "nominal" fee of 1%.  That's what I have to pay when I use my credit union MasterCard.  But on other accounts, it can be more.  A charge on my Hilton Visa (issued by Citibank) in yen cost me 3%.  I have seen double fees:  a percentage to MasterCard or Visa and another charge by the bank.
 
As best I can tell, these charges are added on based on where the purchase is recorded, not on the currency associated with the charge.  For example, on our cruise, all amounts were listed in dollars; but when the time came to put them on our credit card, they were entered in Euros through a European clearing house.  I expect to pay a fee.  In 20/20 hindsight, I should have paid them in cash.
 
It gets even more confusing when your foreign merchant offers to write the charge in dollars using an "immediate conversion" feature.  In these cases, you can get stuck paying a fee for "immediate conversion" and still paying the bank's fees for a "foreign transaction."
 
The only place where fees seem to be under control are at ATMs.  Most foreign ATMs do not charge a local fee, and most withdrawals seem to be converted to dollars at a bank rate without fees.
 
More than you really wanted?
 
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