How do you do online shopping when you're on the road full-time?

Bit of a diversion from the regular diary, but I thought this might be helpful if you're considering travelling, or even if you're not you may have wondered about this.

Online shopping's great, but how do you manage it if you don't have a house to have your stuff shipped to? I touched on this some months ago but since then we've used it a lot more so can offer some more insight.

We've used two systems mainly:

1. Australia Post Parcel Collect or Parcel Lockers
2. Click 'n' Collect (eBay)

1. Australia Post Parcel Collect or Parcel Lockers 

Inside our MyPost account, showing some of the
addresses we've used on our trip and the
options for creating new ones

This is our most common method. You simply set up a MyPost account with Australia Post (https://auspost.com.au/mypost/address/alternatives) and you then have the option to create any number of 'Parcel Collect' or 'Parcel Locker' addresses.

 

A 'Parcel Collect' address is really just a glorified way of having your parcel sent to the local post office, and is a good option if you're happy to go into the local post office to collect your parcel. When we go to order something we'll work out how long roughly it'll take to arrive, then work out where we'll expect to be then or a bit further down the road. We then to go a set up a new address, where we're given the option to search for Parcel Collect locations (i.e. Post Offices or agencies) in the area we expect to be, then select which one suits us best, and hey presto they serve up a customised address with our names, a unique 'Parcel Collect' number and the address of the local post office. We then simply enter that as our delivery address for whatever we're buying and that's all there is to it!

 

There are probably thousands of post offices and post agencies around the country, ranging from large GPO's to suburban post offices to country post offices, right down to little postal agencies which also act as the town's general store and fuel station! So there are HEAPS of options with Parcel Collect. As you can see from the image above, we've created five addresses on this trip so far at different points around the country.

 

Australia Post Parcel Locker. Credit: Airtasker.com

A 'Parcel Locker' is a similar concept, except instead of having to go into a post office the parcel gets delivered into one of these secure lockers which are often located outside post offices. It's really the same sort of idea as the traditional 'P.O. Box', except you can have one anywhere and it's only for parcels, not letter. They're probably more convenient in that you can collect it any time of day or night, but you won't find these in country towns. Alice Springs had one, but Pt Augusta didn't. So we've not used these so far, but they'd be an option for the larger centres.

A couple of caveats: 

1. both of these services only accept parcels, not letters. We had one small parcel sent as a letter and it got returned to the sender. So make sure you check the package size with the sender if in doubt.
2. One retailer we used this with wasn't familiar with the Parcel Collect system and was hesitant about sending it. They also initially left off the all-important Parcel Collect code from the address! So just make sure the other party follows what you say exactly!
   

2. eBay Click 'n' Collect

This system works pretty similar to Australia Post Parcel Collect, except it's most commonly used with eBay only, and instead of going to a Post Office you go to a local Woolworths, BIG W store, Parcelpoint or Hubbed location / store, as well as some smaller retailers. It has the benefit that you don't need to create an Australia Post MyPost account - in eBay checkout you simply nominate which store you want to collect from, you're then given a collect code and the parcel is sent there.

One drawback with this is that it's up to each individual seller if they choose to offer this, and not all do, however you can select in eBay's filters to just show listings which offer Click 'n' Collect. 

We used this early in our trip before we knew about Australia Post's options, but since then we've just stuck with the Parcel Collect addresses, because you can use these for any seller's products regardless of whether or not they support Click 'n' Collect.

There are other services no doubt, but whichever you use you can be sure there are easy options when it comes to online shopping if you don't have a fixed address!

 

-- Greg