Buying goods via the internet for a offspring who are in a foreign land

Our son was in Tokyo 2017 to 2018, in his third year of Japanese Studies at Seijo University and we found out how expensive / difficult it was to send gifts to him.  I hope by blogging this, other families will see what options are open to them, no matter the country.

Buying gifts in your country and then sending by international courier is not cheap.  For Christmas we boxed up gifts.  It weighed under 6 kgs but, was so expensive.

There are a lot of ex-pats through out the world so, we expected there to be online site within a country where, you could have UK food and drink delivered.  What we found in fact was that there are UK based online sites but, they were sending from the UK.  So again, expensive P&P!

Easter was coming up so, we wanted to send a few of his favourite foods.  We did do a search of Tokyo based online stores and indeed found some selling UK/western product.  However, when it came to purchasing from the Shopping Cart, we could couldn't set a Tokyo delivery address with a different invoice address.  The invoice address is important as it is used for your card purchase.  We just couldn't set a UK invoice (payment) address.

Finely, I tried www.amazon.jp for Amazon Japan.  You could search for desired destination country in this way.  I did find that I had to create a new Amazon account because, I couldn't log in with my UK account credentials.  I cannot read Japanese so then, before I continued, I set the language to English.

From Japanese


To English

I then set up the security so that the account could only be logged in to with two-factor authentication.  What this means is that, you have your normal username and password but, a text or voice message is sent to your desired mobile / landline telephone number.  The system sends (at no cost) a six-digit code for you to type in.

You then are able to browse the website with item descriptions, Shopping Cart and Payment steps in English. One more thing which, was very important for Japan is, to get the FULL address from the recipient. It was over wise difficult to complete the delivery part of the purchase without the district and postcode entered in the correct order.

I hope this brief article will be of use to someone.