Gifting in iTunes to people in other countries

Christmas is coming up, and I'm currently living in a country (UK) that's a completely different iTunes store from my family (US). So I'm wondering if I can gift things in the iTunes store if I'm in a different country than the recipient. If I gift something from the UK store, can someone in the US download the items? I'm not even sure if there's a way for me to go to the US version, let alone try to gift an item from there.

According to Apple support, from the U.S., you can gift physical goods to:

Mexico, 15 countries in Europe, and four countries in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand).

Those 15 European countries are: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom. Anywhere else and it seems you need a credit card with a billing address in the target country to send gifts.

However, this does NOT apply to gifting apps:

[iTunes] Gift Cards and Certificates are valid for use only in the country in which they were purchased. Only residents of the U.S may redeem gift certificates purchased in the U.S.

You can't.

From the Apple's iTunes: Sending iTunes Gifts page:

You can't redeem purchased gifts outside of the country of purchase. For example, an iTunes Gift purchased in France can't be redeemed in an iTunes Store outside of France.

Apple haven't yet worked out that people move around the world, and have friends and family in different countries. To give the benefit of the doubt to Apple, perhaps it's to do with tax and legal frameworks, but then how come I can transfer thousands of pounds from a bank account in one country to a bank account in another, yet can't transfer a few quid between two iTunes accounts in different countries?

But then "iTunes" and "easy and convenient" are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

a work around is to visit an online store such as amazon.com and buy them on that site for delivery to the USA address. This way you are buying the product in the USA for someone in the USA.

There is no confusion over who it is for or where it can be redeemed.

Hi I just went trough the same issue when preparing for the 2014 holiday season.

Except for few exceptions, you cannot send iTunes gift to accounts in other countries. More specifically, you can send the gift but the people will not be able to redeem them. They end up stuck with a useless email.

What you can do is send iTunes gift cards. These can be sent electronically and can be purchased for one country's specific store, in your case USA, from another country. You can purchase the codes from Apple, but in my case it was more convenient to buy them from eBay, since it allowed me to pay with a non-US credit card.