Volumetric weight and repacking "service"

I used HopShopGo's BuyForMe service to buy this from buy.com, since they only take US credit cards. HopShopGo charges 10% of the cost of the item, which is fair enough to me.


I used BuyForMe again for these harddrive cases. Powermax.com also doesn't take non-US credit cards. They do take international bank wire, but the bank fee for that is about the same as the 10% charge from BuyForMe.

BuyForMe says the items will be purchased within 24 hours, but the truth is it's more like 2 days. So you will be SOL if it's the kind of purchase you have to jump on quickly. And if HopShopGo already have a package you mean to ship together with the item you're buying through BuyForMe, the wait can cost you in storage fees. Though I have heard of people getting extra storage days fee waived, I wouldn't count on this.

These boxes of tea I paid for with my own credit card on amazon.com. But for some reason these don't ship outside of the US, so I used ShipForMe with HopShopGo.

HopShopGo marked all the packages they received for me as "no repacking available". I just went with it and got charged 9.5kg volumetric weight. I do put some blame on myself for not paying close enough attention to realize they charge for the height/width/depth size of the package as "volumetric weight", not just its actual weight. Also, note that they charge per 0.5kg, not per kg. It's easy to overlook these things, but it's all clearly written on hopshopgo.com

Then the packages arrived, and I feel very ripped off.


Here it is: two boxes and a tiny envelope. Amazon's overly huge box (containing two tiny boxes on the inside) cost me 5.5kg. Powermax put their items in a reasonable size box for its contents, and it cost me 3.5kg. The envelope that HopShopGo could easily have shoved in one of the boxes cost me another 0.5kg.

Watch how I can pack them all into one box, and it wouldn't have even required getting any new packing materials except for a piece of tape to reseal the box.

Amazon kindly provided a huge box. Look at all this empty space once you take out the unnecessary protective air pockets (it's a box of tea, not porcelain figurines).


Powermax didn't go this crazy with the protective packaging. And that's okay, the boxes that the harddrive cases comes in are protective enough. And look, it fits right into Amazon's huge box along with the tea boxes.


Two harddrive case boxes stacked together is the perfect height with room to spare!


Oh, gee, how can I possibly fit this tiny headset convertor into this huge box with this much leftover room?


Look, I can even put some of Amazon's protective air pockets back in as extra padding, even though it's not really needed.



The box even closes perfectly. TADA! This could have saved me 4kg (My location's charge per 0.5kg times eight equals $23.2, well, $13.2 once you subtract $10 to pay for the repacking service).

I've since heard that some people managed to get HopShopGo to really consolidate their packages by repacking it all into one box. They just have to call and nag HopShopGo to do it even if the status on all the packages are "repacking unavailable". But I don't blame myself for this one. There's no way I could have known whether the packages can be repacked when I don't know their actual size and the size of their contents. This must be why HopShopGo doesn't tell you what the measurements actually are, only what it costs you in volumetric weight. And why they make repacking unavailable (even for things that could easily have been repacked!) unless you nag them to repack for you.

Bottom line: Don't use HopShopGo if you have any other option to get the thing you want. Especially if it's something that's big in size even if it's light in weight. It can be a service worth paying more for if there are no other options, but it's not great if your goal is to save money.

I don't mind paying for the service they provide and letting them have some profit, but the fact that they falsely made me think they couldn't repack when they could have, that even when I'm already paying them so much, they still have to gauge me that extra $13... that pisses me off.