As the holiday season nears, overseas shoppers used to the convenience of ordering online may encounter an irritating roadblock: Some retailers don’t ship to military post offices overseas.

Even with major vendors such as Amazon.com, it’s hit or miss. The company will ship some electronic products to Army and Fleet post offices, but not others. Best Buy and Target have similar policies. And some companies don’t ship to military mailboxes at all.

Customers may go as far as plugging in their credit card and address information before being stopped by this message: “Currently the item can only be shipped within the U.S.”

But don’t give up on that gift. There are ways around the problem.

For starters, there is Apobox.com, a small, family business launched by former servicemembers to give current servicemembers more access to products online.

“We’re all veterans and we’ve all been overseas. We know how hard it is to get things we take for granted living in the States,” said company sales and marketing director Glenn Hauptmann, a former airman who was stationed in Europe.

The reason some companies don’t ship outside the continental U.S. is that many large online retailers have exclusive bulk shipping contracts with UPS, FedEx or DHL to lower costs. However, only the U.S. Postal Service delivers to APO and FPO addresses.

Apobox.com gets around the roadblock by giving their clients a stateside mailing address to use during online shopping checkouts. When a servicemember makes a purchase, that item then goes to one of Apobox.com’s distribution centers. From there, the company forwards the packages via the U.S. Postal Service to customers in Europe, the Pacific and the Mideast.

According to its Web site, most packages are processed and shipped out within 24 hours of arriving at the APO warehouse.

Online company Oconus.com has a database of more than 700 companies that ship to APOs.