I didn't realise there was Foreign Purchase Charge on every purchase. Is this a usual thing? I've never come across it before.

It'll depend on your bank/card, not GOG per se, except that GOG happens to be based in Cyprus for financial purposes.

Well I'm with a bank called Natwest, they're not the best of places but still. The price + £1 kind of made me overdrawn which is a pain in the balls. They should make it more explicit I thinks.

Yeah, Natwest charges me £1 a transaction if I use a debit card to buy anything from GOG. My credit card (also with Natwest), however, appears to be percentage based and I get charged a few pence per transaction.

Edit: 6p for a ~£2.20 transaction; 4p for a ~£1.50 transaction, about a 3% fee.

I didn't even know it was legal to purchase foreigners.

I don't get that luxury. Its £1 per purchase regardless of the price. Meaning something 53p actually costs me £1.53. :/ Not much but it adds up when these deals come around on GOG.

Try Paypal. Open a Paypal account, try to charge it from your credit card (local transaction), then use ypur Paypal account to pay for games on GOG.

Certain foreigners are contraband. It's illegal to purchase those ones.

Is paypal as secure? I heard that it isn't that great.

Paypal is the easiest way to minimise the foreign fee (5p extra in the dollar or something like that). The only way to remove it is by getting a great credit card which doesn't have a the fee.

I check the moneysaving website to check them out

But they are the most delicious... :(

Well, it's as secure as the password that you are using. In most cases, when a Paypal account gets compromised, it's because the account owner used the same password as on some other site, which got hacked, and of course the hackers will test whether any login/password combination that they obtained will work on Paypal, Amazon, and any other services where there might be money to steal.

But with regard to security, I believe Paypal actually adds to your money's safety, if you use it like a wallet. My Paypal account never has more money on it than I could stomach losing _if_ it gets compromised. I disabled Paypal's feature to debit my bank account in case of insufficient funds. And _if_ I buy something at a potentially shady site, I'd rather do so with Paypal than giving them my credit card details. Credit card details should by used sparingly on the net, imho. Especially when you don't know whether the other side is storing the data somewhere (hackers obtain lots of valid credit card details from sites that thought it would be a great idea to store their customers' payment details).

There are many things that one can criticize about Paypal, and I wouldn't call myself a "fan" either ... but it certainly has its uses.

On a serious note, I will say that as much as I despise Paypal the one thing it does have going for it in my experience is safety. That being said, their safety isn't enough to keep me using it and be able to overlook all the other mostly just inconvenient aspects. Granted I only used it for a couple of days because they totally fucked up the first transaction I ever did which didn't cost me any money mind you but straitening it out was akin to going to the DMV where I'm pretty sure you have to pass an idiocy test to get hired. :P

What happens if you fail the idiocy test? Does that mean you are more clever than an idiot, or less clever than one?

I use PayPal for some Internet purchases. But my family lost $14,000* from PayPal's seriously crooked shenanigans. A buyer said they didn't like what my fam sold them (a bus), so PayPal took the money right out of my folks' account. But the buyer never gave back the bus (which they were still using, btw). No lawyer would touch it b/c PayPal, the buyer and the seller were all in different states and there was no clear jurisdiction (so I'm told, anyway).

Although they've done some rotten stuff like that, they try their hardest to side with the buyer to keep them viable and keep buyers safe. So I use it as a buyer to keep safe.

* $14k is the number from memory. It may have been +/- a few grand.

P.S. I had an aquaintance who bought a foreigner. He was very odd and bought a mail-order-bride. He always talked about doing it, but we thought he was pulling our leg.