As this is my first blog, I thought I would talk a little about my recent search in the online world. You see, I live in Canada and consistently run into problems with companies that will not ship from the US to me in Canada. It royally stinks! There are so many great deals online in the US! Some of the better sites I have found are...
The real problem is that many of them don't ship internationally. I mean, I would love to have the ability to access usa products, but international commerce makes this very difficult.
I searched around the NY area because I wanted to find someone that would be willing to give up their American address as a place I could have items shipped to. I quickly realized that there are a lot of scam artists out there. Then, I came across these mail and parcel forwarding companies. Some of them were really expensive, but some were actually cheaper than shipping direct from the camera shop. Pretty cool eh! Sorry, that's the extent of my Canadian lingo (actually an American transported here a few years ago).
Anyhow, there were many to chose from, but Bongo International seemed to be the most reasonable. They offered some of the best prices and they also had some pages that were set up to tell me specifics about Canada and the legalities of the shipping industry.
One of the coolest concepts is that they will provide you with your own US Address so that you can buy from all different places and consolidate the shipments into one box. Therefore, the overall cost of the shipment is significantly lower per item you bought.
For example...I was going to buy three cameras from BH Photo. They were going to charge me $128.50 for shipping. With Bongo, it only cost me $20.85 to ship it to their warehouse...and $57.96 to ship it to Canada. I saved $49.69 on this shipment alone!!! That's 39% savings!!!!
The best part of all was that I could go out to other shops online and do the same thing. The more stuff I put into one shipment, the lower the cost per item.
