Back in the murkier days of online shopping I bought a lot of stuff from the States. It was often much cheaper, even with transatlantic shipping costs. Eventually retailers got wise to this and thought it would be much better to set up UK or European operations and restrict overseas sales so they could properly fleece the public.
There are companies that seek to offer a way round this though, and GoSend is one of them. GoSend works by providing a US shipping address for online US purchases. This removes one of the big hurdles from picking up a bargain online in the US. Although some stores still require a credit card registered to a US address, GoSend can also help with this via their Shop Assist service, that provides an intermediary purchase option.
GoSend works like this:
- You shop on US retail outlets websites to your heart’s delight
- On checking out, add the shipping address as the GoSend US address that is provided to you on sign up (a ‘locker’ if you will)
- Items are shipped to your ‘locker’ (based in the tax-free state of Delaware)
- You can keep adding items to your locker, from different websites (for example, when Christmas shopping), but if that’s it…
- Let GoSend know and they will send over your items to the UK, with a reduced, one-off shipping fee – in some cases saving up to 80%
To see the difference in what sort of stuff you can get, GoSend kindly sent us over a selection of American fancy dress costumes just in time for Halloween (they did a special Halloween store for us Brits to use). Their costumes tend to be a lot better than ours, reflecting the fact that Halloween is a lot more established as a holiday over in the States. How did we look in our costumes? Well…
And yes, I do like someone has coerced Jeremy Clarkson into a Batman costume! I have now set up my own GoSend account ahead of Black Friday, in case I can spot a genuine bargain of the century that it would be rude to miss out on. I’d be daft not to!