Maybe you shop online. Maybe you are American. If you are American, you may think of online shopping as a fast, convenient way to save a few bucks on brick-and-mortar store prices. If you live outside America, you may be aware that this is LIEESSSSSSSSS. Nevertheless, I hopped online yesterday to look for a pair of cheap noise-cancelling earbuds since even the most mediocre no-brand ones will set you back $50 in my sorry hole of a country. I found a promising pair on Amazon for 12 USD (by the way Amazon, stop telling me to buy more so I can get free shipping, you know I live in fucking Australia) but it tells me it can’t ship them to me because of “warranty issues”. I’ll take them without a warranty, fucker, they’re $12. But no. I repeat the process with at least 10 other items but I cannot have any of them. I do find one reasonably-priced pair that I can have, but unbeknownst to me it is from a third-party seller and shipping is $89. WHAT. I can’t even imagine anything you could buy online that would be worth $89 shipping. Fuck. By the way, Amazon Marketplace is also completely useless to anyone outside the US and maybe Canada because shipping will inevitably cost at least $30, usually ridiculously more.
Anyway, disgusted with Amazon, I go searching on other websites with much the same result. I also find, infuriatingly, that the same $10-$20 earbuds I was looking at on Amazon cost $60 or more in Australia. Yes there is an exchange difference but the rate is currently 1.2 not THREE TIMES MORE MOTHERFUCKERS ;LKDFSG;KLASDJFGSA’O By now I am convinced that the shipping restrictions aren’t because of warranty issues or any other pansy-ass excuse but because the companies want to continue fucking us up the ass with grossly inflated prices and who would want to stick around for assfucking when they can import shit for a semi-reasonable price online?
Anyway with all my other avenues exhausted I go crawling back to Amazon because I have found another pair of earbuds that they are willing to ship to me. It’s not one of my top picks and I can’t get them in the colour I wanted because for some reason they will only let me have white or hot pink. I guess white and hot pink earbuds are covered by a DIFFERENT WARRANTY OHOHOHOHO. Whatever, they’re still like $20 cheaper than anything else I can get so I take the white ones while cursing myself for submitting to the Amazon’s jerkassery. As a final assfuck Amazon tells me I can’t have regular shipping and have to choose priority courier mail. After I confirm my order it sends me an email saying my “priority courier mail” will take 7-10 business days to arrive. I guess by “priority” they don’t mean high priority… just a priority?
But not all is bad! They also send me $5 of credit for their mp3 store. I’ve never bought mp3s from Amazon but I know they’re good quality and drm-free. Great! I think, I guess this makes up for the previous lameness which wasn’t really their fault anyway. When I try to use the credit it tells me the mp3 store is only available to Americans.
Do you know anyone in America who’d be willing to order and then ship them to you? I’ve done that for a couple of my Australian friends and relatives since i moved to the US.
There’s also a service that for a fee gives you a US address and ships everything received there to you.
I can’t remember the name offhand though, sorry. I also don’t remember how much it was - probably not worth it for one pair of earbuds but if you order a lot of things online maybe it would be.
The practice you’re referring to is called mail forwarding, or package-forwarding. It’s a great idea, but just make sure the place you pick is legitimate!
And then when you think the ordeal is finally over, your own country decides to ream you out a bit more for being so unpatriotic as to engage in international commerce.
I live in the Netherlands and ordered something from Canada a while ago. Between VAT, import tariffs and various other bullshit, I had to pay 33% again of the original purchase price, for the privilege of importing a package into Europe. Thieves.
Yet one more example of what the capitalists refer to as “free trade.” With “free trade,” their capital is allowed free passage across all lines and boundaries, so that they can crush local farmers by shipping qumquats from Djibouti, but your labour and the goods you wish to purchase remain locked and separated behind stone walls and iron fences. One law for them, another law for us.
I live in Norway, and fuck yeah I approve this rant.
The limit on importing merchandise into Norway without paying duty is 200 kroner. That’s less than US$35, people. That’s nothing. Especially since they insist on including the postage in that 200 kr limit. The limit was set back in the '70s when 200 kr was real money. Now it’s chickenshit. Polls show widespread support to increase the limit to 1000 kr. The Post Office wants it raised to 1000 kr. The bloody Customs Service wants it raised to 1000 kr. But Parliament won’t even vote on it because given the choice between pissing off their constituents or losing an insignificant amount of tax revenue, they’ll grab the money every. fucking. time.
While I’m ranting, if your online store allows for purchases outside the United States and Canada, then don’t make me fill in “State or Province”, you morons. We don’t have those here, and anything you make me fill in (like “N/A” for “Not Applicable”) ends up on the mailing label, which confuses our postal carrier who, to be frank, isn’t any too bright to begin with. Give me a “none” or blank option, that’s all I ask. And let me enter a four-digit postal code. Again, that little zero I have to put in front of the four digits to make it acceptable to your software causes our carrier’s little brain to start popping circuits.
Hey, FlyingRamenMonster, fella bilong missus flodnak has ordered mp3s from Amazon a few times. He just pretends they’re a gift for my dad, lists my parents’ house in Pennsylvania as the address, then happily downloads the mp3 himself. Know anyone Stateside who’d let you use their place for a dummy address?
Most of the time I pay no shipping (using the free ‘Super Saver Delivery’ option).
I regularly get US TV series and they don’t cost much to ship (e.g. ‘Dirty Sexy Money Series 1’ cost £1.24 or $2.07)
Amazon Marketplace is brilliant - I get all sorts of rare books and again only pay low shipping costs.
Hey, I live in Canada and I approve of this rant. It is an enormous hassle to get anything across the border. I swear that companies make their money on shipping, not on selling the actual product.
I’m an anarchist and an activist who is often in the media, and I’m probably on every capital-L List the serious men in black suits maintain. Any time I get a package from the US, it arrives looking like it’s been mangled by gorillas and then left in the back of a leaky shed for a week. A friend once sent me some cheese from the 'States. It arrived six weeks late, and was covered in stickers and stamps from inspection agencies on both sides of the border. It had been ripped open and taped shut, then ripped open and stapled shut, then ripped open and hermetically sealed in a thick plastic specimen bag. I’m sure if it had been x-rayed any more I could have used it as a nightlight.
When I told him about it, a comrade over the border offered to mail me a wind-up alarm clock just to keep them on their toes, but I’m not sure spending the next ten years in Gitmo would be worth the amusement.
Oh, you only have the gorilla? I’m sure we have a rhinoceros do ours. I ordered some perfume for my wife. It took 3 months to get to our house in Calgary. The company we ordered from didn’t offer tracking on deliveries to Canada even though Fedex does allow that. They just don’t use Fedex to ship to Canada. You have to use regular post. Canada post is run by retarded monkeys who smoke crack, heroin, and practice lobotomies on each other for fun. When you want to talk to them about their crappy service they fling poo at you and say, interrupted by much hooting and howling, “Yes, we know the delivery guy is probably stealing stuff, but he is a private contractor and we can’t do anything about that”. The end. I’m surprised it isn’t customers who walk into post offices to blow them away rather than disgruntled employees. And don’t get me started on the flatworms who work for customs.
I am in Afghanistan and also approve this rant. Amazon is the worst on this. Check out Best Buy, I believe they have more reasonable international shipping terms.
As a fellow Australian, I hereby add my Big Shiny Stamp Of Approval to this rant from our airborne noodle-comprised colleague.
The only things I can reliably and affordably get from overseas via internet shopping are DVDs and Books, and even Amazon charge insane amounts of money to ship to Australia (currently an extra USD$5 per item on top of their regular international shipping rates). It’s actually cheaper for me to get my books from a website in the UK- cheaper than Amazon and no shipping charges to Australia.
Last time I checked Australia and the USA had a Free Trade Agreement. So why can’t we buy half the cool stuff we see on Amazon?
Online shopping here is appalling- and, I believe deliberately so. I honestly don’t know why Amazon haven’t gotten a .com.au store but the day they set one up is the day half the retailers in the country go out of business.
I mentioned the fact online retailing here is useless recently (in a rant about how hard it is to buy a decent-sized MP3 player that isn’t an iPod in this country) and most of the early responses were “Hey, why don’t you try buying one online?” despite me saying about four times that online retailing in Australia is useless and ForEx/shipping charges from overseas wipe out any savings on the price of the item.
The major retailers here don’t even have online retailing sites- if you’re lucky you’ll get a .pdf of the current catalogue- so not only can you not buy online, you can’t even effectively comparison shop in many cases.
Forget trying to ensure that remote communities in the back-blocks of Nowhere Gully have Lightning Fast Internet Access, how about fixing the online retailing shipping situation here, or at least leaning on our “Free Trade” partner so we aren’t getting our pants pulled down on shipping & handling charges for insubstantial items being ordered from the US?
I actually entered the “send it to Zoom” address because I knew it off by heart from watching it in Canada (what?). I got an error message so I assumed fake addresses didn’t work. If they do, though, that would be pretty sweet.