Anyone manage to order ereader from Kobo.com outside NA recently?

[Nil Einne]

About 2 months ago, I ordered a Aura HD from Kobo.com shipping to my freight forwarder (Youshop) in Oregon and using my NZ credit card (Mastercard), without problem. Funnily enough, although my billing and shipping address were both in the US, they charged me Canadian dollars (169) whereas my impression is they normally charge US dollars for people order from the US. I was happy about that since it doesn't matter to me as I always have to pay the currency conversion fees and the Canadian dollar was (and is) lower than the US dollar so it saved me a bit of money :-) But it did make me wonder even at the time, if they detected my credit card was not a US one.

Today I tried again. First I got around the 404 problem https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=216553 when trying to access the Kobo online shop by setting my X-forwarded-for to be a Canadian IP. But then when ordering I get a "Payment authorization transaction has been declined" error.

While my bank doesn't show authorisation holds to me, my money went down by about the expected amount after ordering suggesting an authorisation hold was successfully placed. I'm using the same credit card, the same billing address and a very slightly different shipping address (going to a different person, note the original Aura was also sent to a different person from the billing adressee/me) from my successful order last time. Oh also ordering an Ivory instead of an Espresso.

Also tried using a Visa CC and a Visa debit although all with the same bank and a mistake was made with the name of the Visa debit (can't try again since my friend already ordered a Kindle).

I know people in the US with US CCs have been having similar problems since before I ordered the first time but considering it was fine for me before and the 404 problem you get now with a non NA IP, I'm thinking that Kobo may have gotten stricter perhaps because of pressure from their partners, and started rejecting CCs they think are from non Canadian or non US banks automatically. (I know Google also seemed to start doing this with the Nexus 4 although they were always fairly strict about trying to stop people outside the US or Canada.)

So I'm wondering if anyone has managed to order from the Kobo online shop outside NA recently and if so how they did it. (I mean kobo.com which sells their hardware and accessories not kobobooks.com of course.)

Cheers

[Nil Einne]

BTW for people who can't order, from this other thread https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...=217037&page=2, I found Green Apple Books do offer free ground shipping at least to my Youshop Portland, Oregon address and accept PayPal in addition to credit cards and their gift cards so you could try them http://www.greenapplebooks.com/kobo-...nd-accessories . Obviously no paying in Canadian dollars but best alternative I've found so far since most others seem to charge for shipping.