Would this be to strange for the average user?

One minor issue from this side of the Atlantic with regard to the BBC. Yes, they do sell stuff on pay-per-view, but the IP issue is because folk in the UK get ‘free’ online-BBC access because we already pay an annual licence fee [it's how the BBC get its primary income]- if you don’t have a UK-based IP, you don’t get it for free.

As a Canadian shopper, I often open 5 or 6 tabs from search engine results and start eliminating the sites that don’t ship to Canada. Sites like Overstock and Amazon that do ship up here get my sales and future loyalty.

Here’s a related blog post we did on the topic last year… http://www.getelastic.com/everyjewelrybox-experienc/

@Fabien, regarding proxies – yes, that’s a hiccup. But most internet technology does have a hiccup – customers clearing cookies, for example, will mess up your targeted selling as will missing analytics tags, sampled analytics reports, paid search attribution over multiple keywords/campaigns, multichannel conversion attribution, images off in email clients screws up open rate tracking etc.

I would imagine use of proxies is marginal. Does anyone have any data on this?

That’s why I’m not not to keen on the IP restrictions used to limit access – what if you’re forced to be behind a proxy that’s not recognized as being located in the required territory? Problem is that there aren’t that many other options available to limit access to e.g. BBC content to people living in the UK.