> It's been impossible to reliably identify a person's location based on their IP address for years, so why do companies insist on trying?

from a technical viewpoint, yes, it's totally nuts.

from a business viewpoint, it solves a hole lot of problems very cheap. i.e. good enough

Agreed.

I have opened and I am met with "We can't ship to %MY_COUNTRY% yet, but we are expanding quickly".

I also wonder why some sites claim they can't ship into here. Virtually all of the post services of the world do ship into this country for years and years yet some sites specifically exclude it.

We did this because we want to guarantee an excellent experience. While the Kickstarter was open to every country, kickstarter backers know to expect long lead times and needing to pay their own import duties. We have agreements with a distributor for all countries in the EU, and are very close to having ones in Canada and the UK.

Postal rates vary by country, and we've experienced more lost packages in some countries than others. Along with 30-45 day shipping times for most international packages.

Having a distributor lets us guarantee inexpensive 2 or 3 day shipping, paperwork free VAT, and easy returns for a much smoother experience overall.

Hope this makes sense!

So it's either an excellent experience or no experience at all?

Yeah, I totally understand your point of view. Perhaps I would myself not ship to my own country due to the business issues you have mentioned. Still sucks.

The costs of shipping? Import taxes or tariffs? High rates of DOA or returns?

Cost of shipping: Tell the customer it will be expensive.

Import: That is paid by the reciever? I have to pay import for things from abroad.

Returns: Most companies tell you to arrange shipping yourself.

Perhaps high rates of DOA might explain, yes.

I can understand not shipping everywhere, at least initially. Most power supplies work everywhere these days, but you have to ship the proper power cable. You also have to worry about customers getting sticker shock if you're not able to explain the customs fees (let alone shipping costs).

I'm in Europe.

And customers in my country are quite aware of the custom fees. And this works for millions of other suppliers.

Where in europe? We ship to all of EU, and just started taking orders manually for UK. Send me an email and I'll see if we can take your order. We're a startup so we really are expanding as quick as possible :)

Ukraine. No order, just my very first impression on the website, which basically says "you can watch but you can't touch"

There's no need to correctly identify any specific person's location. It suffices to determine location of your hundreds of thousands of users with, say, 80% accuracy, to reap the business benefits.

Identifying the country a person lives in would be reasonably accurate. ISPs are generally country specific and have a known range of public IPs.

It's been well known since the creation of www that users attention spans are non-existent and they will leave a page if they don't see the information that interests them within seconds.