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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 11 2013 @ 09:04 PM EST |
There are issues with warranty support for software bought elsewhere - in some
cases, the licenses are geo-restricted, so you can't 'legally' use the software
in Australia if you bought it overseas (a bit like region coding for DVDs, which
IIRC was struck down by Australian consumer law as a restraint of trade).
And, yes, it *is* cheaper to buy from overseas. However, it can be a bit
difficult to do this in practice - online stores refusing to sell orders based
on location are common, and there are also issues with invisible price
switching, depending on where you are. Access the store from a US IP address,
you're offered one price. Access from an Australian or UK IP, and you're
offered another (much higher) price, for the same item downloaded from the same
servers.
Steam is a good example of this - games that sell in the US for $60 or less
might be priced at $99 on the Australian Steam store, despite downloading from
the same servers.
The price discrepancy can be huge. One submission stated that it was cheaper
for a business here to get an employee to fly 13 hours from Sydney to L.A., take
a cab to the nearest Best Buy, buy the software, cab back to the airport, and
fly 13 hours back again. I know Macs used to be like that, where it was cheaper
to fly to LA to buy one than walk into the shop around the corner, but Apple's
hardware pricing is much better than it used to be. (They still want to charge
us a hefty markup for software - e.g. US$30 vs AUD$45 (~US$47) for Quicktime
downloaded from their US servers).[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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