britToAussie

Asos is a big favourite of my wife and I. We really need to stop spending money there, but they've got such a great selection - haha!

We got free shipping last time we ordered a bunch of stuff, but I don't know if that was a permanent deal.

scotinaus

TM Lewin! Free delivery for orders over $150 at the moment

Oh, and of course, Book Depository!

paulry

For these past few days I've been trying to push a 15 item order through with JD Sports and it's bombed out every time at the very very end - and with no meaningful explanation. So today I called their help line and apparently they have a limit on 11 items per Australian order. I wouldn't mind so much if they made that clear early in the process but to wait to the post Verified by Visa end? They have a shabby system too because they still subract the order value from our bank accounts and reverse it several days later

Edit: And they lied - it doesnt work with 11 items either

Turban Explorer

m and m direct for sports stuff
Asos
marks and spencer
lucky brand.com
amazon co uk for entertainment
ebay co uk for stuff you can't find anywhere else

renth

I'd love to order from M&S but last time I checked they don't take the VAT off for overseas orders, do you know if this is still the case?

I can't shop with them on principle if they rip us off by 20%.

Amazulu

They don't

Turban Explorer

I thought they did on my last few orders. Even if they didn't it's still so much cheaper than here.

In Exile

agreed. for me the removal of vat is an added brucie bonus at the end. usually by that time the price+vat+shipping has already made the purchase worthwhile.

I wonder if GH would remove GST if it were even possible to make overseas orders on his shitty website sellingt literally one thing on a daily basis:

http://www.harveynormanbigbuys.com.au/

its akin to an overpriced rubbish version of catch of the day, with worse stuff.

Mercifully I think HN's days are numbered.

my my overseas needs
www.zavvi.com
www.dvd.co.uk
www.thehut.com
are used regulalry for dvds games blu rays etc

Sushimania

My UK DVDs don't work on my newly bought Australian DVD player. Very annoying.

In Exile

google the make and model and 'region hack'. you will more than likely find a sequence of buttons that you need to press on the remote control which will open up the region encoding menu. set it to region zero and you can play whatever you like.

caveat: i am assuming its not a PS3/xbox 360 - neithr of which will work, and also this wont work on the regions for blu ray players (though UK and Aus share the same region anyway).

Sushimania

Cheers! Will try that this evening.

ozzieeagle

Do you think you could ever be tempted by something like XBMC the NBN and legal downloads ? If not, may I tentatively ask why ?

As I personally intend never to buy hard copy of media again. Too much faffing around in getting what you want to screen or HiFi.. I wonder how long it will take DVD's to die as media. I honestly thought their days were well and truely numbered and Blu Ray another Betamax.

XBMC and it's ilk is around 6YO now. I would have thought the inroads it has made would have numbered physical medias days ?

In Exile

sure I would. When the Australian internet infrastructure catches up to the 21st century.

When I got here 4 years ago, download quotas were appalling. My parents in law were still on a 200MB per month plan via bigpong. I was on optus 20GB for $100 p/m! Its better now, but to download HD media you are talking 10-15 GB per movie, and a steady reliable connection.

Hard media currently has its place in the world and at this point in time I will still buy certain types of it, and the novelty of getting some blu rays in your Christmas stocking will be a hard one to replace!!

Also at least currently you can shop around for a bargain with minimal fuss. Also, you would have to give up the obligatory gaming-manual-sniff when you first open the packet

CDs are something that I do not buy anymore. I just use iTunes (US site), which brings me onto my next point:

Take a look at Steam where you have blatant Australian price shafting vs. USA/EU in their gaming prices. Considering its digital and from the same source, this is bad. When you factor in things like potentially having to use a proxy for enabling digital download from an overseas source (to avoid paying the "australia tax" version, in all honesty most of the population wont understand, and will continue with physical media.

Currently the pricing trade off between buying a movie on itunes and buying a physical copy for a similar price makes people question why.

IMO The NBN will not be the bastion of hope that everyone thinks it will. For city dwellers such as myself, the increase in speed will probably be fairly negligible (via throttling), and I still imagine quotas being in place. Its the rural Australians that will really benefit. They will then be able to stream porn clips without having to buffer for 3 hours.

Sort out quotas, sort out pricing policies on internationally available products, and given decent competition and then digital media will take off.
on a global scale though, its a different story. There are still so many places which have terrible internet.

Also can you imagine people like Harvey Norman trying to switch to a digital delivery method for their optical media? They dont even have a product ordering website!! Their pricing policy will be comical and their demise will be spectacular.

ozzieeagle

Ever since TPG brought in their 59 buck unlimited download plan the other ISP's have been playing catchup.

Quotas are now history.... more or less.

Even Optus are doing 500 gigs for 109Bucks with all phone charges included.

New compression techniques and codecs will see that 10-15 gigs size brought down soon enough. Personally I reckon you can get very good quality downloads at around the 1gig per viewing hour ratio with H264.

In Exile

Fair enough, I did say they were getting better.

The alarm bell that is ringing for me is also cost, and the potential lack of incentive that it causes for switching to the NBN, particulalry in the more debnse urban areas where performance is already decent enough. The NBN cost must be recouped and capitalised somehow.

e.g.
http://broadbandguide.com.au/blogs/2...-159-95-price/

At least it wont be like the last time where due to an inefficient splitting of the company, Telsra had Australias balls firmly in its infrastructure vice.

yes compression will bring down file size, but advancedment in technology and particulalry TV panels/projectors will ultimately lead to "True HD" becoming a thing of the past and "Ultimate HD" being the new resolution.

Games will also play a big part here. Highly commpressed games currently can clock in at around 17GB (LA Noire for example). Increase the resolutions of the "next gen" gaming consoles to do 1080 native (or higher) and not 720 and that figure gets bumped.

By the time the intenet has been set up to deal with todays standards in relation to filesize and speed requirements, the filesizes themself will also have increased.

ever the sceptic


Edit: I think we're stylishly off topic here, so I will add this:

I also love ordering things from ebay.co.uk and amazon.co.uk
it makes me feel happy.