I need to order 6 or so textbooks for my massage course. Most of them my school is selling for around the $120 mark (which is cheap for them here), but i thought i would have a look on Amazon, and a lot of them i can get for around $70 US or cheaper.
The thing is its hard to find people who will ship them to Australia, so in some cases i had to select the more expensive books to do it that way.
Which made me think, maybe i should just order them all and ship to a friend in the states, and get her to forward them onto me.
But it means I end up paying for shipping twice, and have to rely on friends etc.
Has anyone done this and found out it worked out cheaper this way? How much is shipping from the states anyway?
As for costs, all depends on method (ie how quick you need em) - there's a wide variety of basically courier, airmail and down to sea-mail
Courier should arrive in 2-3 days, standard airmail could be about a week (goes surface from warehouse to say LAX then plane to Sydney/Melbourne etc and surface again to you) and then there's sea-mail...
There are usually two choices: UPS (couriers) and USPS (postal service).
UPS is a little bit quicker - but a lot more expensive!
Mind you, USPS is not much cheaper either.
Most companies use UPS (or other courier companies).
Books can be really heavy - especially if you order 6 of them... so you could be up for $50-$100 for postage costs alone.
You can "calculate postage" at the USPS site (add .com) to the end of it...
for example: 8 pounds (less then 4 kilos) - would cost from US$55 to $105 to post to Australia. With books & packaging - 4 kilos is not hard to do. and that is cheaper then UPS (which calculates around $200 US). They have a freight calculator as well... although much more detailed then the USPS site..
Have you looked on eBay?? You may be able to pick the books up cheaper, and request they be posted UPSP rather than couriered... if getting from o/s
It would cost you a fair bit to have them delivered to a friend in the states then forwarded onto you - as the postage costs to Australia are still high... and you would have to add the internal delivery cost as well (which isn't too extreme). Best way would have someone bring them over in their luggage if they were flying from the US...
Abs - only some of the sellers would send overseas, other ones would only send within America which is annoying
Jodie - gosh thats a lot for postage... I might as well go with the ones who send to Australia cos i think Amazons postage costs aren't that much to Australia... Otherwise some of them i might get through my school, by the time i pay conversion from US$ to AUD$ and shipping...
I tried ebay, but as they are more like textbooks than novels, i couldn't find very many copies, and the ones i could, they were vey old editions.
You could try a site called biblioz. They often have second hand books that are in Australia so shipping is much cheaper. if you can't find it with google I can pm you the url.
I'd try ordering them through Borders... they can get almost anything at the best price and they have regular student/teacher discount days and/or you can be on their email list and they send vouchers for you to print off and take in. I know they are a chain store but I've found them to be very good at getting in very obscure books at a reasonable price. Isn't $70US about the same as $120AU anyhow? My mental arithmetic isn't flash LOL
Defaintly try some of the ones here in Au as the postage can really add up. I wouldnt recommend sea mail at all though.
Where are you doing your course? is there somewhere you could advertise for the books. Somes people start the courses and then dont continue with them.
Amazon is great and don't charge by weight..they charge per item which works out much much cheaper....I have got sooo many of my psyvh text books from them. The more you buy at once the cheaper it is. One very important thing to keep in mind is that the USPS is stopping ALL surface mail as of MAy 14th. After that you will not have a choice and will have to get anything from there by airmail. They are introducing a couple of fixed rate parcels to supposedly compensate but if you are after cheap stuff on "the slow boat" it aint gonna happen no more!!
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