I hope you all had a super weekend! Shopping away. I took advantage of the Black Friday and cyber Monday sales and had an amazing time at H&M and Asos online stores. And of course all my payments were made through Paypal. I cannot wait to share with you the pieces I ordered.
One of you has asked me how I can be sure that the shops I go to online are real and will ship the stuff I order. Luckily, I have never missed any shipment from them. I tend to shop from well known brands. Also as I said before when shopping with PayPal the shop you are buying from has no access to your card details, so it is 100% safe. Paypal will not affiliate itself with companies that are not properly reputed or licensed.
The steps are pretty straight forward when shopping online, from identifying the product you need up until checkout.
And this is where you may run into the biggest disappointment of them all, which is when you are entering your shipping address. Some shops simply do not include Kenya in their list of shipping countries.
That was an awful shock for me when it first happened to me. And for a while it forced me to abandon certain online shops. I tend to give preference to shops that ship to Kenya.
For shops in the u.k that do not ship to Kenya I use Chris Wilmot Cargo cwcargosourcing@hotmail.co.uk
or http://www.africansalihiya.com/
First and foremost let me deal with the question some of you asked a week ago after the first post. What about taxes and VAT?
Well, KRA has been set up to generate income for Kenya, which in turn allows the government to provide all the services they do. The country simply could not exist without the taxation system.
Import duty and VAT are among their many sources of revenue. And please don’t forget that if you buy an imported item in a shop in Kenya, the price you pay there has also been calculated to include the duty and VAT paid by the importer. So this is something we cannot evade, but it is all dependent on the cost of the items you buy. However, the shipping companies I have listed above will offer subsidized costs on VAT as they ship items in bulk, a win for you and me.
For anymore questions tweet me @silvianjoki and #PaypalKE
Speak soon
