Help please - sending money to Germany!

[EspenW]

True about ebay.de being a paind in the back end.
I buy lots from the US and UK based Ebay, but I've only bought a couple of things from ebay.de. In the rare cases that they acually are willing to ship outside of Germany, they usually won't accept Paypal, and shipping charges are normally beyond ridiculous.

[Jonas_R]

Hmmmm strange since I buy all my stuff from ebay.de and have none of these problems.

Most sellers on ebay.de will ship outside Germany if you ask them. And normally shipping aint that bad, getting it from the US is a royal pain the **** due to customs fees. But I guess living in Norway it does not matter where you get it from, it is always a pain shipping to you guys It is more expensive and time consuming for me to ship a package to Norway then to Sweden. This is simple because I have to make custom papers and the shipping company I use charges extra for shipping outside EU.

Also in Denmark we don't have euro either but still we can pay with IBAN and BIC, so it has nothing to do with currency.

Any of you UK boys that have home banking?

@Andy
I can make the payment for you if have not found a solution yet? However it does take 4 days before seller have the money and the price is 2£.

[EspenW]

Being outside the EU is the key to our problems.
However, if they could ship Postal Service instead of DHL, shipping cost would be normal.
Shipping from the US is fast and easy, takes 5-10 days normally. Toll free limit is a ridiculously low NOK 200 (approx 180 danske), but when the $ was low, lots of parts were below that. For more expensive stuff, I get these as "gifts" from my old friends in the US...

[Prophet_dlx]

Don't blame the germans. If your country had signed the Schengen treaty to its full extend it would work as well for you as it does for us. That wouldn't solve the germans reluctance to use paypal though.

[EspenW]

Not only reluctance to Paypal, but insisting on shipping a $ 20 part with $90 DHL service instead of $ 8 Postal Service is pretty silly. We are outside the EU, but we are neither a part of the Commonwealth nor the United States, and sellers in England and the US have no problems shipping with regular Postal Service.

[Rusty]

Shipping was 22 euros for a 60cm x 60cm x 20cm parcel, 3kg ish. Not bad. Smiley helped out for a small comtribution to Anglo German relations . Good man, thanks a lot to all who have offered.

[Jamo]

The Schengen treaty, yeah like we want to surrender our border control!

[Prophet_dlx]

Works for us and you would have access to SIS (schengen information system), its way more efficent than any of your border controls, even your own house of lords agrees. The drawbacks are few to none. I always wonder why the british tend to forget that it was a union (UNITED Kingdom) that made them strong in the past. The EU would be by far the biggest economic agent on th planet, especially since the US (that's a union too) declines twice as fast as we do, if we could agree on anything other than that cigarettes are bad for health.

[Jamo]

To be fair the government got slated here for not signing it, but there are other factors the SIS being the biggest one. I wonder if daddy USA had something to say about it.

[auditude]

Not only reluctance to Paypal, but insisting on shipping a $ 20 part with $90 DHL service instead of $ 8 Postal Service is pretty silly. We are outside the EU, but we are neither a part of the Commonwealth nor the United States, and sellers in England and the US have no problems shipping with regular Postal Service.

I thought I heard somewhere that German sellers ship via DHL instead of postal service, because DHL IS the German post office. Is there any truth to that or am I confusing the two?

It reads here that international mail from Germany is handled by "Global Mail" under the umbrella DHL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Post

[s2carlo]

Yep, sending money to a country with an other currency costs a lot of money and time. Time the UK introduces the Euro!
Would make life a lot easier (as I do come and have business with the UK)