Any of you folks had experience with parcel forwarding services to facilitate the purchases of some currently cheap U.S. goods? There are several services e.g. yankit.de and shopusa.com. However, apart from the doubts about these services' reliability, I'm not quite sure if the costs and additional layer of inconvenience justifies the savings.

For example on shopusa.com, the calculated additional cost amounts to €200 on a $600 notebook computer! Maybe other services are not so expensive.

Thanks for your help!

I use Bongo International for my outbound shipments that my business sends internationally. They have great rates and provide a great service. Take a look at their site at http://www.bongous.com or you can also take a look at this analysis of other mail and parcel forwarding sites...http://shipping-guru.tumblr.com/

Thanks for that gchapman!

They seem to offer a good service. On top of that, they allow you to use their US credit card for payment in cases where international card denial can be a problem.

I'll post my experiences when all is said and done.

Paul

Paul, do consider that the poster joined specifically to answer your question.... Think about what the poster actually gains from this recommendation - and why he's turned up here so quickly....

Duly noted.

It would have been useful to hear of a genuine experience, but it seems no 'regular' forum user has used such services though. I must plough this furrow alone by the looks of it... Wish me luck!

I wish you luck and please post your experiences, good or bad.

I am investigating starting a business in the U.S. where phone and fax and mail and parcel forwarding (and freight consolidation and a whole lot more) would be part of a bundled business offering.

You are correct that I had just joined the forum. Just getting started here, but I do know a lot about shipping and forwarding. This post was listed and I thought I could be of assistance. Additionally, I would note that I showed you an analysis of other companies that do the same thing. There are multiple options...but I feel that Bongo provides the most value. Good luck!

I had searched for "freight" in the forum and found this topic. I wish that there are more replies on this topic, as I am also looking for the cheapest freight forwarder to bring goods from the US to Switzerland. The link above also helps to compare the rates.

...I've had the best prices and results from UPS Express for stuff I order from the US, mainly camera gear.

Thanks JT. I checked the rates of UPS express, it would be too expensive for the candies I want to import and resell. Candies are quite heavy.

Nothing too original to add, but I'm a firm FedEx fan for everything USA-CH. If you can wrangle the shipment through your company and pay the net price, you can hook into their discount. We use all the regular courier companies, and FedEx work best for us. No, this is not a paid commercial, just my $ 0.02.

My husband's company has provided us with PMI's mail forwarding service. We haven't bothered to have too many things send to us through them, other than our regular weekly mail shipment, but it looks they have a decent program (if you are planning on have things shipped regularly) for shipping packages. Not too sure how their cost compares to other companies, but thought I would throw this out there since we have been pretty happy with their service. Their website is :http://www.pmipmi.com/index.cfm

Hope this helps!

if you go to google you will see the following service

http://www.earthclassmail.com/


their concept is very good : you have several options, one is to hav ethe mail scanned and you can view it online. then choose to have it forwarded if valid mail or discarded if advertising. thus saving on postage.

they are reliable in terms of service.

there may be others , go to google and do your homework. however , there are only about 5/7 companies coming all the time on top of the results.

Hi everyone! I love shopping on the internet, but most of the US-sites I go to don't deliver internationally. The other day, I read about a particular company that "sells" US post addresses:

www.myus.com

The author of the article (who lives in the UK) said that she had registered there for a small fee, 5$ I think, and can now order online, since the delivery service "collects" her package and forewards it to her.

As I don't have any relatives left in the US who I could "misuse" for forewarding packages, my question is:

Have any of you ever used such a service? If so, do you have any recommendations?

Thank you very much for your replies and smiles from Zurich, in the meantime...

Have not seen this before, but it looks very interesting. We still have someone in the US to help us, so we do not need this service. But if I did, it looks like it will work! Good luck and post back the results if you try it!

I spoke with another person in CH who had a service like this. The only problem was that upon arrival to CH, they had to pay the 30chf import tax. On some items that cost significantly less!

I have just given the burden to a friend who opens and repacks my boxes so items do not look new, and ships them as "gifts". In just 10 months I've saved myself some 300 chf on importing.

I would check with Parcelbound International. They have good rates and fast transit times to AU.
Plus if you sign up, the address never expires.

US address infoarcelbound.com

http://www.parcelbound.com/

Try using Outpost SVC. I've been using it for personal shopping and they ship mail and parcel internationally from a US address so there's no problem when you want to purchase a product in the United States.

I use this service quite frequently to get stuff from home. I find the shipping prices to be very reasonable.

http://www.shipito.com