How to Shop US Stores and Ship Worldwide: The Global Shopper Guide

A huge share of American retailers, from major department stores to small specialty brands, only ship within the United States. If you live outside the US, that limits you to whatever international retailers happen to exist locally, even when the item you want is easy to find and reasonably priced on a US site. A package forwarding service, often called a global shopper program, closes that gap.

• Sign up and get a free US address.This is a real US shipping address tied to your account, and it’s what you use as the delivery address when you shop online.
• Shop any US store that ships domestically.Since your US address is just another domestic delivery address to the retailer, there’s no special checkout process or international shipping fee to navigate on their end.
• Your packages arrive at the facility and get logged.You’ll typically get a notification with photos so you can confirm each package before it ships onward.
• Consolidate multiple orders into one shipment. Rather than paying international shipping on every individual order, you can combine several packages into a single outbound shipment, which usually costs significantly less than shipping each one separately.
• Choose your shipping method and ship worldwide. Pick the speed and price point that fits your needs, and your consolidated package ships to your home address internationally.

International shipping is priced by weight and dimensional weight, and every individual shipment carries its own base handling cost regardless of size. Five small packages shipped separately each pay that base cost on top of their own weight. Combined into one shipment, you pay it once. For anyone ordering regularly from multiple US retailers, this is usually where the real savings come from, not any single order.

• Your destination country’s import rules.Duty free thresholds and restricted item lists vary by country, so it’s worth knowing these before ordering something expensive or unusual.
• Package weight and dimensions. Since chargeable weight is based on whichever is greater, actual or dimensional, checking this before you finalize a shipment helps you estimate cost accurately.
• Whether items can be combined safely. Fragile or oddly shaped items sometimes ship better on their own rather than consolidated with heavier packages.

Shoppers buying clothing, electronics, specialty foods, collectibles, or anything else that’s easy to find in the US but hard to find locally. It’s also common among people who’ve previously lived in the US and want continued access to specific brands, and small resellers sourcing US inventory for markets where those products aren’t otherwise available.

Sign up for a free US address, shop as many US retailers as you like, and let us consolidate and ship your orders anywhere in the world. See our Global Shopper page for full details, or sign up and get your free US address today.