How to Buy from Amazon from a Different Country

Hello everyone

Many of you might be quite taken back by this (most likely the entire population of the United States), but… Amazon isn’t actually available in all countries!

I know, the horror!

For many counties, placing an order from one of the world’s biggest online retailers, simply isn’t a possibility, and when it is, it’s a very difficult and expensive process.

While there will always be international shipping and import duty fees, when can make the process more streamlined and cheaper using a 3rd party company called Strackry.

By using them, you can easily save over $1000 with an Amazon order, compared to buying the same products locally. So today, I am going to show you how to buy from the US Amazon, while living in a different country, as cheaply and securely as possible.

Even if you already have a local Amazon in your country, this tutorial can also be beneficial to you, and I’ll tell you why in just a bit.

Not having an Amazon might not sound like a big deal for those of you already with a local Amazon Store, as you most likely can’t even remember a day without you using Amazon, as your first, go to website, when you are trying to find something online.

For everyone else, not having Amazon, sucks.

Anyway, moving forward…

Now, while there are other countries in the world that have their own Amazon stores such as Canada, the UK, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, India, China and Japan, many other countries simply don’t have the luxury of finding just about anything they want, on a single website.

This isn’t even taking the free shipping and other benefits that come with Amazon Prime into consideration either

As I mentioned, even some of these other countries with their own Amazon, can actually benefit from ordering from the US Amazon and not your local Amazon, for two reasons.

The US Amazon is by far the one with the most variety of products, sellers and product availability. Even though you might have a local Amazon, doesn’t mean that you will also have the same products as the US Amazon.

This is because anyone can sell on Amazon, meaning that a seller that’s in the USA, won’t necessarily be in the Australian Amazon, unless they are a large company. It is completely up to the seller, which Amazon stores he wants to be in, based on his logistics and business model.

The Nikon Z6 mirrorless camera isn’t even listed in the Australian Amazon yet (at this current time), whereas it is in UK and US Amazon.

Yes I know, it’s currently only on pre-order, so maybe not the best example, but that also brings me to my next reason.

The other reason to shop at the US Amazon, is the price. Again, just because you have a local Amazon doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same cost for an item as the USA version. In general the US version is always the cheapest.

For example:

• The G.Skill Trident Z 3200mhz 16GB RAM costs $177 in the US, while costing AUS $300 in Australia, which amounts to $214 US dollars in comparison.
• The same happens with the UK Amazon, where the same G.Skill RAM costs £179, which also works out to $236 US dollars.
• In both cases, there is a 31% increase in price, when compared to the US Amazon price.

This is a substantial amount that.

Yes, naturally you have to still factor in shipping fees and taxes, but I’ll get to that in just a bit.

Then there are the countries without Amazon, as even an option.

For us, ordering something locally can be tedious, with limited options available and more importantly, much more costly, due to inflated import duties, local retailer profit margins and local currency depreciation.

It’s very common to see electronic items such as PC components or cameras, costing up to 2 times the amount, when compared to the US pricing.

It really makes me laugh when I see all you American folk complaining about “how expensive” a new camera, CPU or graphics card is, when you really have NO IDEA, how expensive it ACTUALLY is for the rest of the world, in comparison.

Taking, the new Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti as an example, it would cost me $1700 if I were to buy it locally, compared to the $1200 price tag in the States.

The new Nikon Z7 would cost me a whopping $4400 locally, compared to the $3400 price tag on Amazon.

You guys in USA, don’t know how lucky you have it. Yes, yes, I’m very jealous, I can’t deny it!

What’s more, Amazon isn’t even your only option in the US.

You have so many options, when it comes to retail shopping from other massive online retailers such as Newegg, eBay, Adorama and B&H, to name just a few.

This is not including walk-in stores such as Walmart or Best Buy.

All these store do their best to price match each other, when not offering crazy daily deals on top of it all.

So my advice to you the US watchers, is that guys would be grateful for not only the actual very low prices you guys get everything for, but how convenient it actually is. In most cases you get nationwide delivery for free within a few days or less and can also quite easily return any item, no questions asked.

It really is a luxury, that the majority of you don’t even consider.

Alrighty, now for the one factor where we can make a difference, and the reason for this article, is international shipping fees.

For those of you who have never imported something, shipping fees usually depend on either the weight or the cubic size of boxed item.

Sometimes a combination of both.

Shipping companies such as DHL or FedEx, vary on which of these two factors they prioritize, but from my experience, weight is the first factor and cubic size the second.

In other words, the heavier or bigger the box the more expensive it will be to ship. You want to reduce both of those factors by as much as possible to save on shipping fees.

This wasted space is one of the major reason your shipping fees are unnecessarily high. This is simply because the planes and ships that bring these packages over, only have so much space that they can make use of per trip, and charge X amount per cubic area for that space, in order to optimize their income.

So, regardless if your Intel processor is only a few cm in size, if the packaging is huge, then that is what you are going to be charged for, because that is space being taken up.

What we need to do is optimize our packages to use as little space as possible, so here is how we do that.

Ok, moving forward.

Stackry has a warehouse in Nashua, New Hampshire, which is a tax free state in America. It is very important that this is a tax free state, as this also saves you on paying tax for the products you buy in the US, without paying tax for it.

Once you sign up on their website, you get allocated an American delivery address, which is actually a physical locker space in their warehouse. In this locker, you can store all the stuff you order online, in the US for up to 45 days.

So, basically, the next time you check out at Amazon or another online retailer, you will enter this new address, instead of your current home address in your country.

Now, what makes this any better than shipping straight from Amazon?

The first, is that you are able to order almost anything, from any shop in the US.

Anything of a moderate size can be sent here – (so no you can’t send a new car from Amazon there). But for most other things that you can buy online, you can send to this address instead.

Here they can be stored for up to 45 days for free. No subscription, as it comes with your free account

This gives you time to shop around from various stores at different time periods, not forcing you to make an order from everywhere on the same day. It also gives you a bit of breathing space in case an order is delayed from a retailer at Amazon or you need to wait a few days for an item to come back in stock.

The second and most important reason of doing this, is that it will save you a ton of money in shipping fees by sending all items in one package, instead if you were to send each of those items individually, for the reasons explained earlier.

This is what Stackry call their ‘Consolidation’ service and is one of the major benefits of using them.

So, once all your packages have arrived in your locker at the Stackry warehouse, and you feel that you are ready to have them shipped back home, you have two options for consolidation.

The first is to get Stackry to consolidate all the packages with their original packaging. Even with keeping them in their original packaging and letting Stackry repack all the items, you can already save on shipping fees, because of how well they repack everything. The cost per Consolidated package is $2.

But we can optimize it even further with the the second option, which is the one I highly recommend choosing, called the Repacking Fee ($5 per item).

Here you can get Stackry to unbox all your items and repack them into a new box, as tightly and securely as they can. Here no space is wasted and all the items products are packed based on their actual size, not their retail box size.

I first got a quote with all my stuff in the original packaging and one where they unpacked and repacked. The repacked version was half the price.

As I have no need for fancy packaging, I naturally chose this option and you should too, unless you want the boxes of course.

Thankfully the very responsive and knowledgeable person from Stackry pointed this out to me, before my package was shipped.

Thought I’d just point it out incase someone makes the stupid misconception I did.

I then chose DHL instead.

Ok, so back to our shipping calculator.

With 5KGs entered as the weight, we see that DHL would charge me $153.90 and FedEx International Economy $150.68.

Both of these are delivered in 3-8 days, which was quite accurate in my experience.

You might also have the option of FedEx International Priority, which cuts delivery down by a few days for some extra cash. If you are in a rush to get the product and don’t mind paying a little bit extra, then naturally this is a better option for you.

At this point I left the cubic box dimensions open, so that we just saw the raw weight price.

Now that we found that a perfect 30cm sided cube shaped box (with the total cubic size of 27,000cm³) is our optimal size for 5KG, lets see if we can use rectangular boxes as well, while keeping to the 27,000cm³.

So let’s try a theoretical rectangular box of 30cm x 15cm x 45cm = 20,250cm³. After punching those numbers into the shipping calculator, we see that we are well below the 27,000cm³ mark and thus our rates are back to the base minimum.

Just to make sure, I also tried 15cm x 30cm x 45cm, (swapping length and width to see if that matters. As it is still the same 20,25cm³, it had no influence on the fees.

Great, so we can be sure that the cubic size is the only factor used by the shipping calculator, after the weight of course.

So basically, we need just try keep our cubic size below the sweet spot of 27,000cm³, when your weight amount, is 5KGs.

Now, if we go back to the shipping calculator, we see that there is still one small problem, due to the consolidation process.

We don’t actually have an idea of how big the cubic size of the box is that they are going to use, as we want to try and stay below that 27,000cm³ mark, in order to lower our shipping fees as much as possible.

Remember this only applies with 5kgs as in this example. If the weight changes, then 27,000cm³ is no longer the sweet spot.

As an example, the box from my last delivery was 47cm x 37cm x 17cm = 29,563cm³, As you can see, this is above the 27,000cm³ threshold although my weight was 6.8KGs which took priority, so the actual box size didn’t actually come into play.

As I mentioned earlier, either the physical weight or the dimensional weight (cubic size) is used to calculate the final shipping cost. Whichever is the bigger.

Let’s take a look at how dimensional weight is calculated.

The dimensional weight is simply the cubic size divided by 5000. Unsure of why its 5000, but according to Stackry, that is how most carriers calculate it.

Now to see how much cubic size translates into dimensional weight.

First we need official some box dimensions.

As the box sizes they use aren’t listed on their website, I contacted Stackry to get a list of sizes for a better idea of what we have to work with.

Alright let’s look at how weight influences our shipping fees.

From earlier, we saw that 5Kg was $153.90 from DHL and $150.68 from FedEx International Economy.

So we can see two things here:

1. Fortunately the price does not scale with the weight, so the more weight you add, the cheaper the shipping fee becomes in relation.
2. FedEx Economy is cheaper than DHL

Conclusions:

• Once again FedEx Economy is the cheaper option and again the weight vs fees is at about a ratio of 2:1.

Ok so now that we know how the system works, let’s see what we can we do to use it to our advantage and minimise our expenses as much as possible.

The first thing to do is to consider the weight or size of the product/s you are wanting to import. If the weight far exceeds the cost of the product, then it’s not worth importing and you should much rather try see if you can get it cheaper locally.

Naturally if you really need the item and you cannot get it locally, then ordering it is your only choice. In our case it wasn’t worth it, as the book was a “nice to have”, not a “must have”.

This would have been a great book to have, but wasn’t worth the added expenses for shipping. If it had a digital version of the book, then I would certainly have bought that rather.

What we need are lightweight and small items that are of a high value.

Just thinking of computer components as an example.

Look at buying items such as RAM, CPUs, NVMe M.2 and SATA SSD drives from Amazon, to have them shipped over. This is because they are all very small and lightweight items, but that cost a substantial amount in terms of their retail price.

These are the type of products you want to be buying using this service to yield the most savings.

These small items will not even reach a KG in overall weight, while also allowing Stackry to pack them into the smallest box possible thanks to their small size. This will give you the cheapest shipping fees, while saving you hundreds of dollars, compared to if you were to buy them locally.

• AMD Ryzen 7 2700x = $300
• G.Skill 32GB Ram C14 = $450
• Samsung 970 EVO 1TB = $278

Total = $1028 for only a few grams of overall weight and thanks to their small size, you will only be paying around $80 for shipping.

In total let’s say $1108 in total then, plus some import duties will be far cheaper than what you could get them for locally.

Other great items to buy are mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, just make sure they aren’t region locked.

If I were to buy these locally at this moment, I would be paying:

• AMD Ryzen 7 2700x = $390
• G.Skill 32GB Ram C14 = $731
• Samsung 970 EVO 1TB = $579

Total = $1700!

A whopping $700 more if I buy it locally. Let’s subtract $200 for shipping and import duties and we still sit with about $500 in savings.

You cannot argue the value in this, compared to buying locally.

Ok, so only one last question remains – what was in my box of goodies that I ordered from Amazon?

Well, I bought the following:

• Aperture AF-L7 Bi-Color LED Light (Price not available) on Amazon
• Neewer Portable 3 Pack LED Lights () on Amazon
• StarTech USB 3.1 Gen2 10gbps PCI Adapter Card (Price not available) on Amazon
• StarTech NVMe M.2 PCI Adapter Card ($22.41) on Amazon
• Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe Drive ($176.87) on Amazon
• Sony 64GB UHS-II SD Card (Price not available) on Amazon
• Minger LED TV Backlight Kit with Camera (Price not available) on Amazon
• Nexlux LED Strip Lights – 16.4ft (Price not available) on Amazon
• NANAMI Qi Fast Wireless ($20.99) on Amazon
• Altura Photo 77-82MM Step-Up Ring Adapter ($9.99) on Amazon
• Google Home ($129)
• Google Home Mini ($49)
• Google ChromeCast Ultra ($69)
• Shimano SLX BR-M7000 Disc Brakes ($150)

SUB-TOTAL: $1021

• Stackry Consolidation & Shipping ($223)
• Import Taxes ($90)

TOTAL: $1334

Locally, the same items added up to $1625, making a saving of $291.

Now, I had a few semi “heavy” items in there like the Google Home Speakers and my Mountain bike disk brakes, which added to my shipping weight fees, so I would relook them next time.

If however, I had bought a few more Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe Drives, I would have saved a ton of money as those retail locally for $376 compared to the $176.87 on Amazon.

So again, not everything will be cheaper, you need to work out if the weight of the item will increase your shipping fees by too much, compared to the price that you can get it for locally. In most cases small electronics, computer components and camera gear, usually work out far cheaper when buying them from Amazon.

Beside buying smartly, there are also items that you simply cannot ship through Stackry due to them being either illegal or having high clearance requirements, no matter where you ship them from.

I ran into an issue here under Hazardous Materials, when I ordered some Sony Batteries and a charger from Amazon. The reason is that lithium batteries are unfortunately classified as “Hazardous Material”.

This can also become a problem when ordering an electronic product that comes with a battery, such as a camera.

Stackry have to treat as a case by case issue. Not all countries accept hazmat or dangerous goods. For those that do, they have to follow the IATA regulations (International Air Transport Association).

Here are the requirements:

• The lithium ion battery has to be in the device (No shipping of loose or spare batteries)
• There may not be more that two devices per package, and shipment.

Now I didn’t order a camera with a battery, but rather two loose batteries and a charger. So mine had to be sent back to Amazon. However if I had bought a new camera with a battery, then it would have been fine. Just make sure to check with the Stackry team if your country allows it.

Otherwise, you will need to let Stackry take the battery out and leave it with them in order to get your camera shipped without any issues. You will just need to buy a battery locally.

You can find the full list of prohibited items here.

Well, that’s about all the info I have on the best ways to order items from America and Amazon when you live in a different country.

Hopefully I’ve brought this great alternative service to your attention, if you are tired of paying too much from their local retailers and would like to try this out without making the same mistakes I did when I made my first order.

I can highly recommend Stackry’s service, not only for the cost saving benefits, but because of the very responsive customer service via emails. They were very patient with me and my array of errors that I made on my first order and want to thank them for that.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comment section below.

Otherwise have a look at Stackry’s website to get your goodies sent to you.

Cheers.