Ask Lemmy

Pricing is different per region, and they don't want you shipping for apps from a cheaper region.

Due to different purchasing power and average incomes between countries, online stores will usually apply regional pricing so people can afford to buy software (because if they don't people will just pirate). However platforms like steam have the unfortunate problem where because you can gift and trade game keys, items from your steam inventory, etc... there have been cases where people will tunnel with a VPN to a nation with favorable currency exchanges/low regional prices, and buy things there despite not living in the area or having the same purchasing power.

To prevent this, platforms will prevent users from paying in currencies other than what their "home" location is, especially online (I think valve even locks games in CIS nations that make them unable to be gifted or played outside the territory).

It really depends on the region/countries. You can use US cards in Canada freely for instance

I didn't have any issues using my cards when I was in Europe. But IDK how it is in Japan. 🤷‍♂️

Tho I will say in high school, I had friends that imported shit (mostly video games and anime only released in Japan) using credit cards. So if they really don't tske foreign cards there now, it happened sometime after 2003.

For Japan specifically, some retailers want to use 3dsecure (or something like that; it's changed names and versions a few times over the years) which is only supported by domestic cards. Marketplaces that don't care about that might be fine, or they might disallow based on some other criteria.

This is a common misunderstanding that Americans have. The truth is that American banks issue domestic-only cards that cannot be used outside of the USA. You can get an international credit card and it works everywhere.

In most other countries, certainly where I live (Israel), all credit cards are intentional by default and they work wherever you go in the world.

So the truth is that, as is often the case, USA with American exceptionalism has created an incompatible system to everyone else, and then suffers the consequences.

Payment methods are used to confirm your country of residence for region locking purposes. If the payment method and billing address aren't from the same country, the payment method will be denied as anyone can fill in any address they find on the internet, but payment methods like bank cards need to be tied to an actual address. This is also why it's hard (though not impossible) to purchase digital gift cards for people in other countries.