If you’re in North America or Western Europe you might do a significant amount of your shopping online. While the big guys like Amazon are bending over backwards to make sure that you can spend as much money as possible with barely a second thought… like free 2 day shipping, one click checkout, selling everything you can think of (and some things you’d never dream of)... the online shopping game is “a little different” here in Ukraine. 

To us it seems like shops don’t even want our money.

For example:

1) Amazon doesn’t even ship to Ukraine - if we buy from them we have to use an intermediary to ship across the border.
2) We can send money with Paypal, but we can’t receive it...even if our bank account isn’t located in Ukraine.
3) Some websites block Ukraine IP addresses completely so we can’t even browse!
4) Maybe worst of all: We have to enter captchas almost everywhere to prove we’re human. Even on Google. If you’ve ever come across a captcha, you know that even if you are human, captchas can be impossible to get right...

Most funny situation happens when Marco (Swiss Offshore Manager) needs to write his name and surname in...Ukrainian!

There are “workarounds” like using “hide my IP” services, but those put our own data at risk so we prefer not to use them for actual transactions. Then, assuming we are able to actually make a transaction we can almost guarantee that the bank will raise the alarm. We have to verify security codes by SMS. Sometimes the bank even calls you to verify. Any simple transaction can become a demonstration in perseverance.

But, it’s not all bad. Ukraine IPs sometimes score us better deals on hotels and flights than anywhere else in Europe. (Maybe it’s easier to just fly somewhere else to go shopping than actually go shopping online from Ukraine ;))

That’s the Ukraine reality - for now. Getting things done online is a little bit harder than it should be but I can’t be mad that the bank cares about protecting me. The good news is that steps are being made every day. We’re even trying to implement Swiss best practices into Ukraine IT. If we can get a better shopping experience in Ukraine, the wait is worth it!

Amazon, here we come!