Hey all,
Has anyone looked into renting a mailbox in either France or Germany to be able to receive goods ordered within the EU. I buy and sell an awful lot of stuff on Ebay and do most of my general shopping on line. So it would be cool if I could rent a PO box across the border in St Louis, and then once a week nip over to collect my booty (paying the tax at the border of course ).

You can have things sent to post offices in France as "poste restante", addressed to your name. They will keep it for a little while until you come and pick it up. I have not done this myself but my French neighbour does it all the time and swears that it is really this easy.
Let me know how it goes and then I'll see whether she is kidding me with this .
Btw, isn't the Swiss ebay just crap?! Also I really don't like ricardo...

My German neighbour has a box in Konstanz, he mentioned it today. I will ask him for more details. He said that he receives an Email / SMS, when items arrive and he has a card with a pin code to collect them. I will find out more and advise.

In the good old days when I was living in Austria and they weren't in the EU, I had goods sent to the Post Office in Germany on the border. We are talking 15 years or so now.

That would be great, thanks telandy. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes since not only will I have to pay tax but so will any EU based recipients, and that could spell the end of my 9 year Ebay career

The service that I was talking about is www.packstation.de which is supported by DHL. According to my neighbour you do need a German address, however I have emailed them to see if they can accept a Swiss address. The nearest Packstation to me is in Konstanz.

Packstation have confirmed that you need an address in German to be eligable for their scheme.

Old thread but is there anywhere on the french side that does this, near divonne maybe

There's a place in Cessy ( and Thonon les brains too I believe)that does it. It's a removal company I think but I can't remember the name at the moment.

I'll google and see if I can find it, I guess I could boat over to le bains

Here you go. It's called Self box and us in Val Thoiry not Thonons.
Cessy is not far from Divonnes in any case.

http://www.cartons-de-demenagement.info

I have used the Post Restante service for receiving a small expensive parcel at the Saint Louis post office in France, everything went well the second time... the problem is knowing when the item has been delivered. Post Restante only keep the item 10 days, then it is sent back. So if you have a tracking service it should work OK for you.