In fairness, it's not always their fault, if your name and special number aren't clear on the parcel then it arrives and is basically lost forever. Unless you do what I did and go mental for days and days and threaten to fly to the UK and find the parcel yourself.

Touch wood, nothing has ever gone missing

Once they have the parcel they can be awful too, just deciding to wait a few days before shipping and then charging quite a princely sum for the trouble.

Still, cheaper than flying home to buy a fleshlight the things you need.

I've used S&S a lot in the past and generally it's worked well, however, it seems to be a lot more expensive that it used to be. It's hardly worth buying stuff online (UK and US) anymore.

Wrong technically, but not wrong through common sense. All the value being added is taking place outside the country. At best, I can understand charging VAT on the shipping fee (which of course, they do too).

It all depends on what you buy. I buy clothes which are usually 30% cheaper in the UK than here and when the UK sales start i can save at least 60-70%. I am one of those weirdos though that goes into a shop, prices it and tries it on first
At a time i usually save AED1000

I buy almost everything (except food) online and now mostly find that shipping direct from the states (Amazon) is cheaper than using S&S. As others have said, its much more expensive than it used to be and hopelessly unreliable. I've had stuff depart US and not land in Dubai for two weeks - god only knows where the products went.

How do you do that tho as 90%+ of the things I look at on the US and UK Amazon say they won't ship to the UAE.

As for S&S, I've never had an issue with them..... but yeah its expensive now.

There is a special place in hell for Aramex in general... I used them recently to get some documents from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, and they were without exception the most awful company I have ever used in almost 8 years in the UAE. They even managed to make Etisalat look competent...

My eye twitched at the mention of the phone company.

However, we just won our battle with them. It took to emailing every single senior person we could find on Linkedin, including board members from their corporate website. BUT....we won in the end.

Tempted to go back to the shop where we were completely deceived and give the sales guy two fingers.