Can you recommend a service / company? Would like to get merchandise for a friend in Thailand as a birthday gift, but online shopping only possible within US. Nothing special, nor heavy, no hurry either.... who is reliable? Thanks in advance!

Amazon ships to Thailand. Just have to switch countries and your friends

address 

10 hours ago, jcmj said:

Amazon ships to Thailand. Just have to switch countries and your friends

address 

 

Re Amazon, it depends on what exactly the OP wants to buy.  Some kinds of products Amazon can and will ship to Thailand addresses, usually for some added fee.... But for other kinds of products, including food products, fabrics and various other things, you'll get an error message saying Amazon can't ship that product to Thailand.  Just have to check on an item by item basis.

 

If you log into Amazon and switch to a Thailand delivery address associated with your account, their search results will tend to narrow the offered choices to those that show as available for shipping to Thailand.

 

These are a couple of examples where they don't ship to Thailand:

 

 

 

 

For my U.S. online shopping, I've had very good experiences using a Thailand-based forwarding service called We Shipping USA, which you can find on Facebook under that name.

 

Basically, you contact them by FB Messenger where the Thai rep speaks OK/rudimentary English. They have two options for forwarding U.S. online shopping stuff to Thailand -- an address in Virginia, if you're not in any rush, that has every month or so ocean shipments that cost a flat fee of 300 baht per kilogram, never any extra Thai customs or VAT charges. Delivery time is 2-1/2 to 3 months.

 

Or, for quicker delivery, an address is Oregon that does weekly (Friday deadline) air shipments to Thailand for a flat fee of 800 baht per kilo, again, no extra Customs or VAT fees. Delivery time about 2 weeks.

 

For either option, nothing extra on the Thai end except for the small domestic EMS mailing charge to deliver your packages to your home here, once they've arrived to Thailand and cleared Customs. So you never have to worry about any nasty surprises or unexpected duty charges coming from Thai Customs upon receipt.

 

Payment is by bank transfer to their Thai bank account once your package has arrived here in Thailand, cleared customs and they send you a FB Messenger notification with the price owed, which is just the actual weight of your package X the applicable per Kg. rate.

 

Are there freight forwarders who receive in USA and ship to Thailand? Reliably? Cheaply? Still with the usual high import taxes?

13 hours ago, jasonsamui55 said:

Are there freight forwarders who receive in USA and ship to Thailand? Reliably? Cheaply? Still with the usual high import taxes?

 

I think I answered that above as YES... With WSUSA, the sender never pays any Thai customs duty or VAT on what they send -- only the flat fee per Kg. rate listed above for either sea or air shipment.

 

The 300 baht per kg sea shipment rate is the best I've ever found anywhere for sending packages from the the U.S. to Thailand -- sea method being if you're not in any hurry.

 

IME, the 800b per kilo air shipment method they offer is comparable with, or a bit cheaper than, what most of the other U.S. to Thai package forwarding services charge for air delivery...and I've used or checked on a lot of them over the years, so I'm familiar with their actual rates.

 

 But, and this is a big but, most of the other U.S. based  air forwarders will leave the sender on the hook for added and often unpredictable extra charges from Thai customs on the receiving end, and with WSUSA, you don't have to deal with that at all... never any extra charges on arrival.

 

The only method that I'm aware of that's a better pricing deal than WSUSA's air forwarding is having someone in the U.S. (a private party) receive the item for you, repack it, and then take it to a local post office and have it shipped International First Class mail. To qualify for that, I believe the package has to be under 4 lbs, and there's no intl tracking on those.  And thus, that's part of the reason why most US commercial package forwarding services don't offer than option directly, preferring instead to use (and charge for) pricier methods like UPS, DHL, FedEx, etc etc.