International E-Commerce Considerations?

I'm a bit new to international e-commerce but we're planning to make some files available for download and I would love to sell them internationally. What are the things that we need to be concerned about? I'm guessing some of the following:

1. Credit card processing - Probably need to check with our merchant account provider. My guess is that they if they have a Visa/Mastercard/Amex then they should be able to use it on our site.

2. Being able to handle international addresses - I'm guessing that if we're accepting foreign transactions we'll want to have something set up to allow customers to enter an international address into our system. Are there any general guidelines as to how to best implement this?

I think that's probably it. We don't need to worry about shipping as we're talking downloads and I don't think taxation is an issue either. Potential piracy is an issue but that's probably best left to a separate thread.

Is there anything else I should be thinking about here?

 

If you are an American business, than a traditional merchant account should work fine for you, provided that the type of download you are offering isn't considered high risk. For a merchant account it doesn't matter who you sell to, it just matters where 'your' business is located at.

For international credit cards, you will charged a much higher processing rate than with US credit cards. International cards can't use AVS which will cause every international transaction to downgrade. Also, make sure you require CVV to help prevent fraud since AVS is unavailable.