Buyers Recommendation: Shop in Germany if possible for now

Kevinf63

Hi all,

With the UK pound and Euro turning to sludge from Brexit talks and PC component price inflation creeping in, its nice to make a noticeable saving on costly builds.

I was building a new rig for my brother and found that Amazon.co.uk, Overclockers UK and Scan all had very high prices for critical components like RAM, CPU and graphics cards.

So I did a bit of digging on Amazon.de, shopped around and found the price difference was staggering, often making €50-80 saving between a group of components.

International shipping would be an issue for certain parts, so to counter that with the help of @discombobulate on his thread (German Parcel Motel) I found mailboxde.com which will open a free mailbox address for you in Germany and forward it to your home address.

A shipping calculator exists on their site for you to see if its worth the trouble. See my comparison of the same three parts (500GB SSD, i7 6700K CPU and 1 stick of 16GB RAM) between UK and DE below. I recommend keeping it to small components like CPU and RAM rather a full PC chassis or a PSU.

:cool: I hope it helps you and others! :cool:

FobleAsNuck

do you get free shipping from .de?

Kevinf63

FobleAsNuck wrote: »

do you get free shipping from .de?

They do indeed. I believe its over €35 and of course the shipment must be fulfilled by Amazon for this to work.

savemejebus

Kevinf63 wrote: »

They do indeed. I believe its over €35 and of course the shipment must be fulfilled by Amazon for this to work.

I've never gotten free shipping from amazon.de themselves, have gotten it from marketplace sellers on there though. Usually shipping costs 7-9 euro.

I would advise however checking all the Amazon sites for what you like. One of the easiest ways to do this is search for the stuff you like on uk.camelcamelcamel and then change the uk. to fr. or it. or es. or de. E.g. it.camelcamelcamel

Mickalus

When buying from Amazon uk, always pay in Sterling and let the bank do the conversion to Eur on their end. It's a much better rate than Amazon's.
If you take the GBP price OP and convert it using your bank's rate, you'll see the difference.

It's still not as good a price drop as you're showing from DE, but it'll be worth ~20 euro or so.

TerrorFirmer

Personally I avoid buying direct from Germany as returning items can be more difficult and awkward than using Amazon/OCUK/etc for the sake of €50 savings.

When you're getting to the stage where you have to use German Parcel Motel operations to get the item delivered here though, you've definitely gone way beyond any worthwhile savings in my opinion.

savemejebus

Not wanting to sound like I have shares in Amazon but amazon.de now have dedicated English language support and (having just returned a faulty liquid freezer 120) will refund the return shipping costs very quickly.

Kevinf63

savemejebus wrote: »

I've never gotten free shipping from amazon.de themselves, have gotten it from marketplace sellers on there though. Usually shipping costs 7-9 euro.

I would advise however checking all the Amazon sites for what you like. One of the easiest ways to do this is search for the stuff you like on uk.camelcamelcamel and then change the uk. to fr. or it. or es. or de. E.g. it.camelcamelcamel

The item must be marked as "Eligible for FREE Delivery" similarly to UK site.

My recent purchase was shipped by Amazon as the seller. The free shipping does not pop up as a separate option like it does on the UK site, but proceed into the last payment confirmation section that gives you the final price and it will show free shipping.

I really must use camelcamelcamel more often. Recently started using Geizhals.eu for EU price comparison, which although their website looks straight out of 2001 has a great search engine for PC hardware.

Kevinf63

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Personally I avoid buying direct from Germany as returning items can be more difficult and awkward than using Amazon/OCUK/etc for the sake of €50 savings.

When you're getting to the stage where you have to use German Parcel Motel operations to get the item delivered here though, you've definitely gone way beyond any worthwhile savings in my opinion.

For my brother, I was building him a machine for use as an Audio workstation in a studio. I was originally given a larger budget, but due to other unforeseen matters, €200 was stripped from it, which of course is a large chunk that would weaken his machine considerably.

Rather than scale back, between amazon.de and a lucky find using geizhals.eu search engine for his GPU I reduced the price by €125 which included all the shipping costs and no change in components. The other €75? I threw my own cash in as an extra present I'm only offering another possibility for people who might be struggling with keeping the costs down. If it helps one or two, great! But I know it won't matter to large number of users here.