**AUSTRALIAN** question **NO KIWIS ** please

[koberulz]

The forwarder gives you what is basically your own postal address in the country in question. You use that as the shipping address when you order, then the forwarder receives the items you ordered and sends them on to you in whatever country you happen to be in.

Shipito is a similar thing for the US.

[lemonski]

Originally Posted by Bourne1886

How does that work in practise? If JB Hi Fi have stopped shipping to the U.K. do they ship to the freight forwarder in Australia and then they in turn ship to the U.K?

Yep, as koberulz mentioned, the forwarder gives you your own unique shipping address in that country (a bit like a P.O. Box number) and you just get the retailer to ship to that address. Most forwarders will let you store packages for a certain time, and when you're ready to have them shipped they'll send them on to you in the U.K. There are dozens of forwarders in the US, you just have to do a bit of research on which one offers you the features that suit you best. Pay careful attention to the shipping costs, make sure there's an economy shipping option! There's no point ordering a big bunch of stuff on Black Friday if the shipping will wipe out all your savings.

You won't find the same range of forwarders in Australia though, the market for it isn't big enough. I could only find two that looked set up for consumer forwarding, Aus FF was the one I tried and they were pretty good, no hassle at all.

Originally Posted by Bourne1886

I’ve never used a service like that before and I’m curious as to how it works. There are plenty of releases that are exclusive to certain companies and they won’t ship to other countries like Best Buy etc in the USA and this could be the answer to all my problems so to speak.

They won't work for Best Buy, they won't ship to known freight forwarders. I managed to bypass that by using a couple of very obscure forwarding companies, but I don't know if that works any more (the two I used aren't around any longer). But yep, it's invaluable to have a US and UK forwarding address in case you need an exclusive or get around delivery restrictions (e.g. Kino sales or Amazon stupidity)