A few weeks ago, we covered the best ways to sell items from abroad on eBay. Now we will cover how you can buy items when abroad from eBay. The good news is that eBay has already made this process simple for the countries it services. We have also written extensively on how to sell items on Ebay from countries it does not service, and we will recap a lot those ideas here.
Buying from Abroad On eBay
Unfortunately eBay does not reach every country in the world, but it does reach quite a few. According to eBay’s own help page, buying items internationally is really easy within these countries. When you are on the standard eBay site, you merely have to adjust filter settings to get worldwide shipping results. Doing so will reveal all the results of your search in available countries.
“But,” you ask, “How should I pay for it?”
Purchasing
If you are going to be buying internationally on eBay, you will want to use PayPal. Yes, you can use your standard credit/debit card, but then you have to manually do the currency conversions. This can be a surprise when using a Debit/Credit card because you are never really sure how much you will end up paying. Banks typically charge anywhere from 3 to 5% on currency conversions. PayPal automatically does this for you, and lets you know the amount (typically charges 2.5% fee) you’ll be paying before you complete payment.
You will also want to keep an eye on the shipping costs. These obviously vary from product to product, so just keep your eyes peeled so that some outrageous fee doesn’t sneak up on you.
If for any reason your country isn’t supported by PayPal then chances are you cannot use your debit/credit card either because PayPal is the primary payment processor. Anyhow, if such is the case use a prepaid card from this list here.
eBay Supported Countries
Luckily there are some simple (and perfectly legal) ways of getting around this. The smartest option for getting items from eBay in an unsupported country would be via a package forwarding service. We have covered this topic extensively, so feel free to check out our comprehensive post here. Are you not sure what a package forwarding service is? Basically, it is a service that gives you a US/UK address to ship orders to. Once those orders arrive, the forwarding service will send it to your country. They are basically a middleman for all of your packages. All of the ones we recommend are generally pretty fast and won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
Those are the two ways you can buy items internationally through eBay. As you can see, it is actually a pretty simple process (much easier than selling anything on eBay internationally). So to recap:
- Check to see if the seller is shipping to your country otherwise signup with a parcel forwarder and get a local address (of your seller) to reduce shipping fee.
- Use PayPal For Simple Currency Conversions (But Beware The Conversion Fee) or your own Credit/Debit Card if PayPal is not available to you.
- Watch out for shipping costs. If you have multiple sellers to choose from, use the one who is in the same country as the delivery address. It will make everything much simpler.
That pretty much sums it all up. Happy shopping!