KnifeCenter - Ugly if you are living abroad

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W.T. Beck

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I am a US citizen living and working in Germany now. Needing some knives here, I decided to order from a company from which I have always recieved good service in the past, which is the KnifeCenter. They also claim on their website that they accept foreign orders.

I guess that means only orders from foreigners. When I tried to order some knives and have them sent to my apartment in Germany, they replied with an email saying they would only ship to my US address. They also mentioned something about no "third party" deliveries, but there is no third party involved - I just happen to have a house in the US, and an apartment in Germany, too.

So the great folks at KnifeCenter will sell to foreigners, but if you are an American temporarily living and working abroad - forget it!

I have been a KnifeCenter customer in the past, but this insulting incident will cost them any future business from me.
 
I'm not sure if we have all the facts we need.I know if you order by credit card with alot of companies,they will not ship to an address other than the credit card billing address.If your using a card and attempting to get a delivery in Germany instead of the USA,Knifecenter may feel someone got ahold of your card info.If you call the credit card company an add the Germany address as an additional authorized shipping location,Knifecenter can than verify this thru the card company as an authorized shipping location protecting himself from any possible card fraud.Heck if I was in Germany I'd be running to the Hubertus factory :)
 
My permanent address is still in the US and I have no reason to change my credit card address to my apartment in Germany. I can check my balance and make payments to the card from here, online.

I am working a contract job and will return to the US when the contract is over, so I have no reason to claim my apartment here as my permanent address. I have not immigrated.

I still say it is absurd that I cannot order knives from KnifeCenter, when presumeably my German next door neighbor can!
 
There's some confusion here. You don't have to change the address on your credit card; you only have to add the second address as an authorized shipping location.

This has nothing to do with being in a different country; you would have to do the same if you (or someone else trying to use your credit card) wanted a knife shipped to a different address in the same country.

You don't really want everyone who can find out your credit card number and expiration date to be able to buy things with your credit card and have them shipped to any address they want, do you?
 
The reason I was able to give my German address as the shipping address is because the KnifeCenter order form has a separate place to enter a shipping address if it is different from one's permanent address. Apparently they do accept a separate shipping address in some cases.
 
No,I didn't say to change and make the address in Germany permanent.Many people have different shipping addresses listed on the Card Companies computer for whatever reasons.It has nothing to do where you live or want the billing address to be.I can have numerous different authorized shipping addresses if I want.It only takes a short phone call to activate now or deactivate when you return.A company not shipping to your billing address is just common anti-fraud protection policy.Yes,it can be frustrating,but its there for everyones protection from unauthorized use.Like I said though,it is easy to add the addional shipping location with a 5-10 min call.Take care
 
Hello Cougar and Tombstone,

Thanks for your advice, but I doubt the reason for the rejection of my order has anything to do with whether or not my credit card company had my German address. If it were Knifecenter's policy to accept shipments to additional addresses registered with the credit card account, I think they would have told me this rather than simply refusing to send the order. All they said is that they would only ship to my US address - period. They did not offer any suggestions on how to validate my German address.

Furthermore, KnifeCenter has subsequently canceled my order without making ANY offer or suggestion of how to correct the situation.

I certainly retract anything good I have said about this company in the past, as they seem to have no problem with pissing on a repeat customer who has publicly praised and endorsed them.

By the way, Mr. Allen, would it be possible to search these forums, find, and delete any positive statements I have ever made about KnifeCenter?
 
Thanks for your advice, but I doubt the reason for the rejection of my order has anything to do with whether or not my credit card company had my German address.
Click to expand...

I doubt that your German neighbor can order from them and you can't b/c your an american living over there. I aggree that you can simply add your overseas address for verification free of charge and it would save you some hassles if you shop online.

Edited to Add:

Also I don't see a reason to delete your previous posts about Knife Center. You made them for a reason. Obviously you must have valued there service upon posting them, so I would think they should remain. However this post will also come up upon a search so all the info is valuable
 
... the KnifeCenter order form has a separate place to enter a shipping address if it is different from one's permanent address. Apparently they do accept a separate shipping address in some cases.
Click to expand...

Sure, if payment is by money order there's no risk in shipping it anywhere requested.

It's not just the KnifeCenter; it's general practice among net dealers to refuse to ship credit card orders to a different address, and I'm afraid it's general practice not to send a detailed explanation, too. If I were a dealer I think I would write a macro to send a form letter, but few net dealers seem to have much facility with macros. It's probably explained in detail somewhere on the website....

Not all dealers know enough to refuse such orders; there are always naive newbies starting up web dealerships, so the thieves keep sending out orders -- it only takes them a minute and sometimes it works. I guess the vast majority of such orders must be from thieves, probably well over 90%.

There's no technical obstacle to searching out and editing your old posts, but anyone who does a search on KnifeCenter will find this thread as well as the others. Maybe better to leave all the facts here and leave it to readers to make up their own minds? Your decision....
 
I don't speak for Knife Center and I don't ship abroad but I can share a little insight with you, I think. In the first place, understand that if there is fraud or a credit card chargeback for any reason, the merchant pays for that, not the bank or credit card processor. I paid for $650 worth of chargebacks just yesterday. One was fraud. One was an antsy customer who couldn't wait for his return to arrive and have us process a refund. Obviously, the chargeback arrived long after we did process the refund so we've paid him twice, at least for now. The other was theft on the part of the credit card holder.

The reason merchants ask for a billing address is that they can verify it. There is comfort in shipping a product to the same address to which the credit bills are sent and this address can be verified. There is little comfort in sending a shipment to some other address because it can't be verified. If you say my billing address is in the U.S. but I want you to send the shipment to my apartment in Germany, it looks like an obvious fraud to someone reviewing the order. In your case it isn't fraud but in the very great majority of cases it is and we see several of these kinds of orders every day.

If I shipped abroad and you asked me to ship to germany from an order paid with a U.S. based credit card, I wouldn't do it either. It isn't anything personal. It is just that the set of circumstances you have set up fits a profile for fraud. No knowledgeable dealer is going go for it and Knife Center is the oldest knife dealer on the internet. They are knowledgeable indeed.

Hope this helps you understand the situation from the dealer perspective. You may not have liked the result but if your credit card number had been stolen and used by a fraud, you might appreciate that, in protecting themselves, they would also be protecting you. Perhaps the solution is to telephone them and talk it over. Once they know you aren't a fraud, everything should get fixed. Take care.
 
Thanks Fred,

I appreciate all of the explainations given here, although I must continue to point out that KnifeCenter themselves did not explain their reasons. They advertise that they accept foreign orders, and then promptly rejected mine.

I simply don't think I can be said that KnifeCenter offers good customer service, when they act in this manner. Had they explained the situation and asked me to register my German address with the credit card company, I would not have this complaint. I am not saying that a company should not take measures against fraud. However, they should also not offer to accept foreign credit card orders without explaining the details on how these orders should be made. Nor should I have to post a complaint on BladeForums to learn the explaination from another party.
 
I have bought kit from the knifecentre for over 5 years now and it has allways been shipped to my work address rather than the billing address (need to keep the wife as far away as possible fron these things after all :D )

It was probably a lot simpler 5 years ago and now there is trust between us.

However as a vendor my company got stung with nearly 20k pounds of credit card fraud two years ago and we had to foot the entire bill.

I would not blame any reatailer if they did not ship to different address's
 
This was quite a thing about a year and half ago. We would get upwards of 12 fraudulent orders from Indonesia per day. I guess they quit after they discovered nobody would send them anything. The negative for Indonesia is that nearly every mail order company in the U.S. blacklisted the entire country. Honest people couldn't get orders filled either. We had quit doing international orders before that all started so we just deleted these orders as they arrived and ignored them. But I can assure you it was credit card fraud.
 
I also had a disappointing experience with Knifecenter recently.

I ordered a Boker knife from them, received two confirmation emails from them and a tracking number, and then got a separate phone call saying that there was some problem with my address and my credit card company that precluded them sending the order.

I was quite confused as I had an email saying "it is sent" and a phone message saying "there's a problem with your address and the credit card company."

This credit card and address combination is something I use for several packages a week. The shipping address and the billing address for the credit card are the same, and are in the US. It could not be a more vanilla transaction.

After several more frustrating back and forth conversations where it turns out that the tracking number I had been given in email was for an order that had shipped in 1998 etc etc I finally got someone on the phone who basically insisted that the problem was mine and that I needed to call my credit card company and straighten it out. When I told him that I was cancelling my order, he sounded genuinely relieved (not genuinely relieved that an annoying person was not going to bother him, but genuinely relieved that he wouldn't have to deal with this).

I then placed the order for the same knife to the same address with the same credit card number with A. G. Russell without any problems at all.

There is something wrong with Knifecenter's credit card processing, and there is something very wrong in how they are reacting to customers who encounter this credit card processing problem.
 
I think it is quite obvious that this is a problem of customer service rather than mail order fraud. As bagman has indicated above, KnifeCenter does ship to European customers and even to different addresses than the billing address. Obviously the problem here is inconsistent treatment of customers, and failure to inform a customer of proper procedure.

If it is the case that KnifeCenter would have shipped the order had my German address been registered with my credit card account, KnifeCenter certainly didn't bother to tell me.

I think it is the case that when some companies get so large they just don't care how they treat customers any more. Driving off one customer doesn't matter when they have so many. Also, with mail order and internet companies, there is alway new suckers out there who will give them a try.
 
Thanks Cumberland Knives! I was surfing knife dealers tonight and found that Cumberland Knives also ships overseas. I sent and email and got an immediate response from John at Cumberland Knives that he would gladly take my order and ship to my address in Germany. Now that is great service!

There are plenty of knives for sale here in Germany, but prices are quite high for anything not made in Germany, with the possible exception of Victornox. For example, today I saw a Kabar Marine Combat in a knife shop in Frankfurt with a price tag of 96 Euros, which at the current exchange rate is slightly over $100.

Prices are more reasonable for the German brands, such as Boker, Puma, and Linder. US made knives and even the Scandinavian brands are quite a bit more than in the US, however.
 
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