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Australian Post Office Opens Mail Forwarding Warehouse In the USA

Posted by timothy on from the up-over-vs-down-under dept.

Zanadou writes Australians are well used to paying what's called an "Australian Tax": high(er) prices for international products and services simply because they are are being accessed from an Australian IP address and/or being delivered to an Australian mail address. But Australia Post, Australia's national mail service, might have a solution: last week they opened a new warehouse/delivery depot in Oregon, U.S., allowing Australians to use a U.S.-based delivery address for mail items, which can then forwarded onwards to Australia.

However, this service, called "Shopmate", comes at a cost.

3 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. This isn't new by dmbrun · · Score: 3, Informative

    New Zealand has a similar service. It's been running for a couple of years or so.

    It is called Youshop https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools...

    The USA warehouse opens the parcel and repackages it if they can. This saves volume and for Amazon packages this might be a 50% volume saving. All of the packages are then bundled together and shipped to New Zealand for final distribution.

    For the user there may or not be a mail cost saving. You pay for shipping to a US address and then for shipping from there to Australia. The service is extremely useful where the seller won't ship to a foreign address but will ship to a US one.

  2. Re:I'm not clear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Photoshop, MS Office etc., are 40% more expensive in Australasia. It comes from historical justifications because they needed to put products on board to get them there, not as many customers as the US, etc, and they're trying to maintain the markup premiums despite digital delivery. If you come from an Australasian IP then you'll pay a premium

  3. Re:I'm not clear by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Informative

    After reading the links it's still not clear to me why this is occurring. Is it that sellers charge Australians more just because they can, and if so, are they not able to get away with it elsewhere? Do even huge online retailers like Amazon charge different prices depending on the country the items are going to? I'd have thought the US Federal Trade Commission would be scrutinizing these practices.

    For a variety of reasons.

    The most obvious ones are Australian distributors with exclusivity deals - for some products like Adobe and Microsoft software, this is the primary reason why it costs more.

    Others include legal requirements - taxes, duties, support, warranties and other things, some of which only apply in Australia. So an Australian using this service might lose out on that or may find they need to ship the product back to the US because the Australian depot refuses to service it for not being purchased in Australia. Or maybe Australia forces a product to be warrantied for 2 years or more, while the US version is 90 days to a year, and stuff like that usually gets factored into the price. So some Australians might get confused when the product they buy only has a 1 year warranty because it was purchased through this service rather than through the Australian distributor (where it has 2 years). Apple products come to mind for this - if you buy it in Europe, you get the 2-3 years EU law provides (and pay for it), whereas if you bought it in the US, you get standard 1 year.