March 29, 2010 at 20:31Gentleman's set of online shoppers: Shipito + ProfitBid + TrackChecker
In the wake of the hatred of the Russian Post, one can easily trace the fact that more and more people are buying goods from abroad. Thus, not wanting to overpay Russian huckster retailers undermining the state’s policy in the field of import substitution. And I am one of them.
However, Orthodox Russians are faced with many obstacles by virtual shopping, the most difficult of which is the country of residence. Unfortunately, our homeland is classified by most online stores as a third world country, not otherwise, and therefore we can not see direct delivery there.
The way out of this incident, obviously, is the mail forwarding service.
So in this article we will talk about
PS. The topic contains my referral links.
PS2. Traffic
Shipito provides services for the consolidation and forwarding of your packages to anywhere in the world. An introductory review of this service on the hub was not so long ago (and not one ), so I will not delve into the narrative of the service, but only tell you what new shipito is preparing for us.
As you could already read from the above links, shipito is a consolidation and shipping service in one person, i.e. the scheme of working with the service is simple:
I remind readers about the service tariff schedule
Now let’s show on my fingers how much it costs to send a pair of boots and jeans from Amazon, through shipito, using 2 different tariff plans
1. We use the Individual packages tariff plan
- we pay 8.5 when registering, which immediately gets to your account (deposit)
- we pay buying shoes and jeans on Amazon (most likely they will be delivered in separate packages, because Amazon will take them from different sellers) and send them to your new address in California. Let's say jeans and shoes cost you $ 40 + $ 50
- we are waiting for the arrival of two parcels to your account.
- after the parcels arrive at the warehouse, you will immediately receive a notification in the mail about which parcel and from whom it was received in your account.
А в самом аккаунте непосредственно появится посылочка с ее размерами и весом, а также с именем отправителя (uraban original в моем случае)
— допустим первыми пришли ботинки и мы решаем их сразу отправить. Для этого мы собственноручно заполняем таможенную декларацию, где вписываем boots — $40
— а далее нам надо пополнить наш счет для того, чтобы оплатить услуги по отправке посылки (напомню что до этого мы уже заплатили $8.5 за услуги shipito, так называемый mailout fee)
Для того, чтобы понять сколько нам надо заплатить за доставку надо бросить взгляд на жирную цифру внизу ($47.83). Для выбранного метода отправки (Express Mail Intl) непосредственно услуги почты обойдутся в $37.71, а к тому же 4.3% от суммы доставки надо заплатить сверху для покрытия расходов shipito на банковские операции.
You can change the type of mail delivery without problems, click on change and select, for example, USPS Priority
- we can replenish the account in two ways - Paypal and directly from the card, choose to taste.
- after replenishment, our package will be sent successfully. But bad luck, sending came out more expensive than shoes, which is not good. But jeans also came to us, which also would have to be sent by paying $ 8.5 + ~ $ 40 (postal services).
As a result, we will post about $ 90 for sending 2 separate parcels . Not profitable ...
Therefore, we will go the second way and buy a subscription for a month / year for $ 10 / $ 50
2. We use the Virtual Mailbox tariff plan.
Let’s buy from us once, so buy a subscription for a month by paying $ 10
We will wait for the receipt of two parcels in our account and proceed to the consolidation process.
By clicking the consolidate button, we will see a window with the consolidation settings.
For the first two options, everything is clear, this is the sending method and insurance.
The third option allows you to choose whether we want the consolidated package to fly out immediately after picking it, or if we want to send it a little later (here it is worth noting that after the package has been completed, only 3 days of free storage are given)
Then we are offered to choose how the consolidation process will go on. And at this stage there are 3 options
A. Keep outside boxes- as the parcel arrived from Amazon, so it will be placed in a new large box. A very good consolidation method for fragile items, but the weight of the parcel will be more than the weight of the box and packaging material.
B. Keep retail packaging - the box in which the parcel arrived will be discarded, and what was in the parcel will be thrust into a new box. Those. the box in which the shoes lie will be saved, and the mail box itself will be thrown out.
C. Remove all unnecessary packaging - the box in which the shoes lie is also thrown out. The most economical way, because save weight and space. People manage to buy 18 pairs of shoes in one package.
The problem and inconvenience of the current consolidation page was that we could not choose the consolidation method for a specific package. Those. choosing one of the items, we set the consolidation method for all merged packages. But it happens that a shoebox can be sacrificed, but it was not advisable to throw away the packaging from the dining room set.
In this case, it was necessary to write a special request (special request), where it was necessary to describe which method to use for which package. Nothing terrible, but that's just this request is $ 8.5 =)
But we have jeans and boots, packages can safely donate, so we choose the method of the C .
We won’t give any special instructions either, so we just check the boxes in front of our packages and send packages for consolidation, paying only $ 2 for this.
This is what a placed consolidation request looks like. You can edit it before executing it.
After your request is fulfilled, you will see among your packages a new consolidated package, in which our jeans + boots will be.
As a result, we will receive one parcel instead of two, which means we will pay 1 time for delivery.
This is how the consolidated package sent looks like. You can see which packages were consolidated.
Let's calculate how much we spent following this method
$ 10 (tariff plan) + $ 2 (for consolidation) + ~ $ 45 (for sending) == ~ $ 57- already much more profitable. And imagine that we still had some things - then the benefits are even more tangible.
Remember the consolidation page? Where the choice of consolidation method was applied to all consolidated packages, so John (CEO Shipito) decided to make our life easier by providing a new consolidation interface.
And just the new consolidation page is designed to solve the problem of writing out special requests when it is necessary to save the packaging in one package and throw it away in the second.
A test version of the new page is available at rival.cz/shipito/index.html
It can be seen that now the consolidation method for an individual package can be chosen completely free of charge. In addition, the consolidation page itself has gained a more user-friendly interface.
There is one catch with shipito. Some stores really do not want leaks of their goods abroad and mail problems, so they added the California address shipito to their black lists, after inexperienced buyers wrote letters saying that they used the intermediary service (shipito), and they didn’t receive goods, blah blah blah.
In addition, the sales tax in California for many stores is 8.95%, which is also not a bonus.
John responded to these problems by starting a new warehouse in Nevada. There is no sales tax in this state, and the address, I hope, will not be on anyone's black lists for a long time.
In general, as you can see, the service is growing and developing, and the opinions of end users are very much appreciated. The atmosphere of "home" service is present, because There is always the opportunity to write to any employee by personal mail and find out if something is wrong.
So, if someone has not registered yet and has not felt the delights of online shopping, then we are asking for mercy .
If you have any questions about shipito, then I will try to answer.
About the ProfitBid service was also written on the hub , but the audience is growing every day, so newcomers might not see this service.
Briefly, the essence of the service:
- you register on the service, gaining access to your personal account
- before buying on ebay / amazon / replenishing_skype / goDaddy / much more, you go through the referral banner from your personal account and make a purchase
- thereby profitbid receives money for that the buyer clicked on his link and brought the money.
- part of the profit is profitbid and gives it to you, crediting money to your personal account.
- a month after the accrual, you can withdraw money to a WMZ wallet (there are other withdrawal methods).
Thus, you can quite successfully get a 3-5% discount on purchases on ebay and amazon
This is how my personal account looks like, unfortunately I don’t buy on Amazon often, therefore the payout amounts are ridiculous, but for those who buy expensive lots or make this is often - this service can do a good job.
There have never been problems with the service, all paid lots steadily appeared in your account, and payments to wmz came a maximum of a day after a request for withdrawal.
On the other hand, there appeared software that is universal, functional, made for people and free!
I am talking about the Track Checker.
Now, all of its numerous hanging shipments can be tracked from one program.
The program interface is clean and clear. A
tree-like interface with the ability to catalog using folders is what you need. You can sort the tracks according to your convenience.
The color coding in the right column shows how long the shipment has been taking.
The statuses themselves are as follows.
An interesting solution was to add the ability to create personal events to the status tree.
So for example in the photo below you can see that I added the “Paid” event to know when the payment occurred. Pretty comfortable.
I dump the delivered packages into the delivered folder. For all shipments, you can force the status “Received”, then their icon will warm up, and when the tracks are updated, the received tracks will not be updated. It is very useful in this way to keep track history.
When adding a new track, you choose from which mail servers to take statuses for the track, because the mechanism for automatic recognition of services by track number does not yet fully work.
Another convenient thing is the counter of departure days.
By double-clicking on the information part of the selected track, where you can see how many days your package is on the way
, as well as write any comment on the track
The undoubted advantage of the program is that it does not store its settings anywhere except next to the executable file. This means that by placing it in the dropbox, you can run it from anywhere.
We’ll go over the settings.
Here’s all that’s needed:
- automatic updating of information with a specified frequency
- starting at PC startup
- settings for tray behavior
- color settings
- proxy settings
After I first came across this program, I immediately wanted to thank author, it became much easier to live with this program.
Therefore, if the creation of the MetalFan habrayuzer is also useful to you on the farm , then do not be shy, donate!
In addition to the well-known Asian meccas dealextreme.com , focalprice.com , kaidomain.com, you can pay attention to the American thinkgeek.com - this is where smartmasses goods often come from, only with normal prices and a much wider range. Delivery to Russia is expensive, but we are now on YOU with shipito, so the question is no longer so acute.
Shop of unusual gifts (for geeks in life, not just technical ones) - http://www.vat19.com/
Here you can say a few words about the following stores
- Shop of any boxes, sets, supports, all that can be called organize - Organize.com
- Mecca of coffee lovers - SanMarcoCoffee.com
- Tea lovers - www.lupiciausa.com , www.mightyleaf. com , teashopchina.com , japanesegreenteashops.com
Here the list is simply immense, so I will give the most popular:
- sale of shoes and clothes - www.6pm.com
- closed auctions of branded clothing and accessories:
gilt.com - invite to gilt
ruelala.com - invite to ruelala
ideeli.com - invite to ideeli .com
modnique.com - invite to modnique.com
rownine.com - invite to rownine.com
- shoe megastores - endless.com , zappos.com
- well, you can see the full list of US stores at shophelpe
This, of course, is a small fraction of stores, just to enter everything here is simply no strength.
Topic co-authored with Habraiser Rihtor
However, Orthodox Russians are faced with many obstacles by virtual shopping, the most difficult of which is the country of residence. Unfortunately, our homeland is classified by most online stores as a third world country, not otherwise, and therefore we can not see direct delivery there.
The way out of this incident, obviously, is the mail forwarding service.
So in this article we will talk about
- innovations in the intermediary service - Shipito
- A service that returns the percentage of purchases on ebay.com/ca/uk, Amazon, Skype, GoDaddy - Profitbid
- Finally, MetalFan created an excellent software (completely free) for tracking mailings of all TrackChecker mail services
- A small list of interesting stores
PS. The topic contains my referral links.
PS2. Traffic
Shipito - upcoming innovations
Shipito provides services for the consolidation and forwarding of your packages to anywhere in the world. An introductory review of this service on the hub was not so long ago (and not one ), so I will not delve into the narrative of the service, but only tell you what new shipito is preparing for us.
As you could already read from the above links, shipito is a consolidation and shipping service in one person, i.e. the scheme of working with the service is simple:
- purchase at the store
- sending goods to your address in shipito
- consolidation of goods in one big box, if you have several products
- shipping to destination country
I remind readers about the service tariff schedule
1. Individual packages
Cost: a
one-time payment of $ 8.5 is a fee for the service of sending your parcel
Pros:
- cheapness
Minuses:
- there is no possibility of combining (consolidating in shipito terms) parcels into one, in order to save on the cost of postal services.
- The free storage period for your parcel until its dispatch is only 7 days.2. Virtual MailBox
Cost:
- $ 10 per month or $ 50 per year
Pros:
- the possibility of consolidating an unlimited number of parcels (the cost of combining each parcel is $ 2, i.e. if you have 3 parcels that you want to combine, then pay $ 2 + $ 2 for consolidation services)
- The term for free storage of parcels is 45 days
- it is beneficial if you make purchases from the USA regularly.
Cons:
- a higher fee for services, $ 50 per year or $ 10 per month.3. Premium MailBox
I will omit the description of this subscription, as It is suitable for seasoned middlemen.
Now let’s show on my fingers how much it costs to send a pair of boots and jeans from Amazon, through shipito, using 2 different tariff plans
1. We use the Individual packages tariff plan
- we pay 8.5 when registering, which immediately gets to your account (deposit)
- we pay buying shoes and jeans on Amazon (most likely they will be delivered in separate packages, because Amazon will take them from different sellers) and send them to your new address in California. Let's say jeans and shoes cost you $ 40 + $ 50
- we are waiting for the arrival of two parcels to your account.
- after the parcels arrive at the warehouse, you will immediately receive a notification in the mail about which parcel and from whom it was received in your account.
А в самом аккаунте непосредственно появится посылочка с ее размерами и весом, а также с именем отправителя (uraban original в моем случае)
— допустим первыми пришли ботинки и мы решаем их сразу отправить. Для этого мы собственноручно заполняем таможенную декларацию, где вписываем boots — $40
— а далее нам надо пополнить наш счет для того, чтобы оплатить услуги по отправке посылки (напомню что до этого мы уже заплатили $8.5 за услуги shipito, так называемый mailout fee)
Для того, чтобы понять сколько нам надо заплатить за доставку надо бросить взгляд на жирную цифру внизу ($47.83). Для выбранного метода отправки (Express Mail Intl) непосредственно услуги почты обойдутся в $37.71, а к тому же 4.3% от суммы доставки надо заплатить сверху для покрытия расходов shipito на банковские операции.
You can change the type of mail delivery without problems, click on change and select, for example, USPS Priority
- we can replenish the account in two ways - Paypal and directly from the card, choose to taste.
- after replenishment, our package will be sent successfully. But bad luck, sending came out more expensive than shoes, which is not good. But jeans also came to us, which also would have to be sent by paying $ 8.5 + ~ $ 40 (postal services).
As a result, we will post about $ 90 for sending 2 separate parcels . Not profitable ...
Therefore, we will go the second way and buy a subscription for a month / year for $ 10 / $ 50
2. We use the Virtual Mailbox tariff plan.
Let’s buy from us once, so buy a subscription for a month by paying $ 10
We will wait for the receipt of two parcels in our account and proceed to the consolidation process.
By clicking the consolidate button, we will see a window with the consolidation settings.
For the first two options, everything is clear, this is the sending method and insurance.
The third option allows you to choose whether we want the consolidated package to fly out immediately after picking it, or if we want to send it a little later (here it is worth noting that after the package has been completed, only 3 days of free storage are given)
Then we are offered to choose how the consolidation process will go on. And at this stage there are 3 options
A. Keep outside boxes- as the parcel arrived from Amazon, so it will be placed in a new large box. A very good consolidation method for fragile items, but the weight of the parcel will be more than the weight of the box and packaging material.
B. Keep retail packaging - the box in which the parcel arrived will be discarded, and what was in the parcel will be thrust into a new box. Those. the box in which the shoes lie will be saved, and the mail box itself will be thrown out.
C. Remove all unnecessary packaging - the box in which the shoes lie is also thrown out. The most economical way, because save weight and space. People manage to buy 18 pairs of shoes in one package.
The problem and inconvenience of the current consolidation page was that we could not choose the consolidation method for a specific package. Those. choosing one of the items, we set the consolidation method for all merged packages. But it happens that a shoebox can be sacrificed, but it was not advisable to throw away the packaging from the dining room set.
In this case, it was necessary to write a special request (special request), where it was necessary to describe which method to use for which package. Nothing terrible, but that's just this request is $ 8.5 =)
But we have jeans and boots, packages can safely donate, so we choose the method of the C .
We won’t give any special instructions either, so we just check the boxes in front of our packages and send packages for consolidation, paying only $ 2 for this.
This is what a placed consolidation request looks like. You can edit it before executing it.
After your request is fulfilled, you will see among your packages a new consolidated package, in which our jeans + boots will be.
As a result, we will receive one parcel instead of two, which means we will pay 1 time for delivery.
This is how the consolidated package sent looks like. You can see which packages were consolidated.
Let's calculate how much we spent following this method
$ 10 (tariff plan) + $ 2 (for consolidation) + ~ $ 45 (for sending) == ~ $ 57- already much more profitable. And imagine that we still had some things - then the benefits are even more tangible.
Innovations
Remember the consolidation page? Where the choice of consolidation method was applied to all consolidated packages, so John (CEO Shipito) decided to make our life easier by providing a new consolidation interface.
And just the new consolidation page is designed to solve the problem of writing out special requests when it is necessary to save the packaging in one package and throw it away in the second.
A test version of the new page is available at rival.cz/shipito/index.html
It can be seen that now the consolidation method for an individual package can be chosen completely free of charge. In addition, the consolidation page itself has gained a more user-friendly interface.
There is one catch with shipito. Some stores really do not want leaks of their goods abroad and mail problems, so they added the California address shipito to their black lists, after inexperienced buyers wrote letters saying that they used the intermediary service (shipito), and they didn’t receive goods, blah blah blah.
In addition, the sales tax in California for many stores is 8.95%, which is also not a bonus.
John responded to these problems by starting a new warehouse in Nevada. There is no sales tax in this state, and the address, I hope, will not be on anyone's black lists for a long time.
In general, as you can see, the service is growing and developing, and the opinions of end users are very much appreciated. The atmosphere of "home" service is present, because There is always the opportunity to write to any employee by personal mail and find out if something is wrong.
So, if someone has not registered yet and has not felt the delights of online shopping, then we are asking for mercy .
If you have any questions about shipito, then I will try to answer.
ProfitBid - return interest on purchases
About the ProfitBid service was also written on the hub , but the audience is growing every day, so newcomers might not see this service.
Briefly, the essence of the service:
- you register on the service, gaining access to your personal account
- before buying on ebay / amazon / replenishing_skype / goDaddy / much more, you go through the referral banner from your personal account and make a purchase
- thereby profitbid receives money for that the buyer clicked on his link and brought the money.
- part of the profit is profitbid and gives it to you, crediting money to your personal account.
- a month after the accrual, you can withdraw money to a WMZ wallet (there are other withdrawal methods).
Thus, you can quite successfully get a 3-5% discount on purchases on ebay and amazon
This is how my personal account looks like, unfortunately I don’t buy on Amazon often, therefore the payout amounts are ridiculous, but for those who buy expensive lots or make this is often - this service can do a good job.
There have never been problems with the service, all paid lots steadily appeared in your account, and payments to wmz came a maximum of a day after a request for withdrawal.
TrackChecker - A free, feature-rich mail tracking program
On the other hand, there appeared software that is universal, functional, made for people and free!
I am talking about the Track Checker.
Now, all of its numerous hanging shipments can be tracked from one program.
Key features of the program:
- Checking the status of tracking numbers on a variety of mail sites.
- The ability to create groups of tracks in any configuration will allow the user not to get confused in their premises.
- The ability to add and configure any mail service using the user interface of the program does not require intervention in the program code (although the user will need to know the syntax of regular expressions and the ability to debug and compose http requests).
- A variety of settings will allow you to customize the program for yourself: Scan period, startup, notifications, appearance of the package list (highlighting tracks with color, changing the font of the track tree, etc.), connection settings, and many other options.
- Storage of program settings, settings of mail services and user data in xml format next to the executable file of the program.
- Work through a proxy server or directly. Network requests do not slow down the program interface.
- Check for program updates.
- Filtering, quick search and sorting of tree tracks.
- And much more...
The program interface is clean and clear. A
tree-like interface with the ability to catalog using folders is what you need. You can sort the tracks according to your convenience.
The color coding in the right column shows how long the shipment has been taking.
The statuses themselves are as follows.
An interesting solution was to add the ability to create personal events to the status tree.
So for example in the photo below you can see that I added the “Paid” event to know when the payment occurred. Pretty comfortable.
I dump the delivered packages into the delivered folder. For all shipments, you can force the status “Received”, then their icon will warm up, and when the tracks are updated, the received tracks will not be updated. It is very useful in this way to keep track history.
When adding a new track, you choose from which mail servers to take statuses for the track, because the mechanism for automatic recognition of services by track number does not yet fully work.
Another convenient thing is the counter of departure days.
By double-clicking on the information part of the selected track, where you can see how many days your package is on the way
, as well as write any comment on the track
The undoubted advantage of the program is that it does not store its settings anywhere except next to the executable file. This means that by placing it in the dropbox, you can run it from anywhere.
We’ll go over the settings.
Here’s all that’s needed:
- automatic updating of information with a specified frequency
- starting at PC startup
- settings for tray behavior
- color settings
- proxy settings
After I first came across this program, I immediately wanted to thank author, it became much easier to live with this program.
Therefore, if the creation of the MetalFan habrayuzer is also useful to you on the farm , then do not be shy, donate!
Since the development of the program depends only on my enthusiasm and your support , you can
support the development of the program as follows:
- Report bugs
- Share your experience
- Offer logical program improvements
- Send track numbers from email services not supported by the program
- Support financially through WebMoney: Z115026052638 R189413198278 or Yandex money: 41001398841583
The shops
Geekam
In addition to the well-known Asian meccas dealextreme.com , focalprice.com , kaidomain.com, you can pay attention to the American thinkgeek.com - this is where smartmasses goods often come from, only with normal prices and a much wider range. Delivery to Russia is expensive, but we are now on YOU with shipito, so the question is no longer so acute.
Shop of unusual gifts (for geeks in life, not just technical ones) - http://www.vat19.com/
At home and tea / coffee manam
Here you can say a few words about the following stores
- Shop of any boxes, sets, supports, all that can be called organize - Organize.com
- Mecca of coffee lovers - SanMarcoCoffee.com
- Tea lovers - www.lupiciausa.com , www.mightyleaf. com , teashopchina.com , japanesegreenteashops.com
Clothing, shoes, accessories
Here the list is simply immense, so I will give the most popular:
- sale of shoes and clothes - www.6pm.com
- closed auctions of branded clothing and accessories:
gilt.com - invite to gilt
ruelala.com - invite to ruelala
ideeli.com - invite to ideeli .com
modnique.com - invite to modnique.com
rownine.com - invite to rownine.com
- shoe megastores - endless.com , zappos.com
- well, you can see the full list of US stores at shophelpe
This, of course, is a small fraction of stores, just to enter everything here is simply no strength.
Topic co-authored with Habraiser Rihtor