If you are sending gifts to friends or family overseas, all sorts of additional hassles apply. You'll have to fill out customs forms, and your recipients may well be stuck paying taxes on your gift. Better to buy overseas and ship from there. E-tailers outside the U.S. (especially Europe) are much more common than they were even a few years ago, and many offer English-language versions of their sites. (Check the home page for a US or British flag if you don't see the word "English.") You and your gift recipient may be much happier if you go that route.

One way to find a foreign retailer is to look up the country's top-level domain (e.g. .de for Germany), then go to Google's page. There, enter the gift you want to give as a search term and put the country domain in the Search Within a Site or Domain box. Amazon has sites for most major countries, which accept U.S. credit cards in payment. And there's always iTunes electronic gift certificates, which are good anywhere that iTunes sells music and video.

[Yardena Arar is a freelance writer in San Francisco.]