sleeping mat advice

In my experience all overseas postage is expensive, not much difference between UK, US or Japan. If lucky, it is sometimes possible to get free international travel which helps a lot.

Hi, most online stores use these ridiculously expensive ways of shipping to international customers because they are literally forced to. Most international business is paid for via PayPal; and without offering PayPal services, businesses get dramatically less orders. And PayPal simply requires extremely expensive ways of shipping from every single business that uses their service. To prevent both "rogue" businesses and customers giving PayPal a bad name, they require the highest possible standards in tracking and delivery verification. For international shipments, that comes at a hefty price, which the businesses pass on to the international customers, especially since most of them don't depend on them. They know that they can do that simply because at this point in time, they pretty much own the market of online payment. A business can't even let the customer "opt out" of this and say "I'm ok with you shipping with a lesser degree of tracking / delivery confirmation". If a business does that and PayPal finds out, they cancel the account of that business. So some businesses grin and bear it and then have no other way but passing on that cost to their customers, and others plain don't ship overseas anymore. Practially, the only real ways to avoid this is to either pool orders with friends to share the shipping costs, or pay through another way than PayPal. In the latter case, that might not work though, as many businesses are so streamlined for PayPal in their setup that it's too much work for them to do it differently for you, even if you ask and explain. Sigh. It's worth having a good look at what you really need for what you want to do though. Often there are things that can be used equally well at a lesser cost and / or sourced locally. A wealth of information on that can be found by checking the net for information on lightweight backpacking. Some things are unavoidable, but for many commercial tramping items there are very capable alternatives or MYO solutions. Cheers, Matt

Thanks for the explanation, Matt. It's making more sense now. Not too surprising unfortunately. I can understand them not being allowed to ship with a lower quality of service, but are there different grades of international Track & Trace couriers and does NZ Post not sell the higher grades that cost 2+ times as much? Or is it just the contrasting cost of living?