Drop Point…
During my early days of Project-PC, I made one of the best investments. No, it wasn’t the PC I built, in fact it kept depreciating in value the day the parts arrived. I am actually talking about the Aramex Shop-&-Ship service. Shop-&-Ship is a service provided by Aramex, a popular Middle East courier service based in Dubai, that provides you with a US or UK business address. It allows you to purchase things online from any US/UK online retailer and have them delivered to your home in the Middle East. S&S has worked for me throughout the years, whether I want to get cheaper and hard to find computer parts or even start my “buy and sell” business, it truly was one of the better ventures I went with.
A visit to your local Aramex store within the GCC should be enough. GCC stands for Gulf CooperationCouncil which basically covers the six major countries in the Middle East peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain & Oman). So regardless if you move to another GCC country, youll still be able to use this facility. Aramexonly requires a passport & visa copy and a fee of 120AED. Once the processing is done you will be given a US and UK business address. Now you can order from most US or UK e-commerce sites and they can deliver it to your business address. The most common site you can use to get things is on Amazon.com and Google Checkout. The thing about it is that Amazon acts as a mediator to the business establishments it has on its site and one thing is that it accepts international credit cards. The problem is that dueto credit card fraud, some e-commerce sites do not allow purchases if the credit card and shipping addresses do not match. This is also one of the reasons why it is also difficult to purchase stuff on EBay if it has “PayPal Verified Shipping Address” written all over it. This is why Amazon and Google Checkout are the main online stores for S&S subscribers. EBay has potential but has limitations not to mention signing up for a PayPal account. The good thing about PayPal is that it acts as a CC without exposing your CC details, providing you security and you could avoid purchasing hassle from sites which do not accept international credit cards.