Category: Shopping

None of the shipping companies are consistent so every few months I like to check and see which one of them is currently performing better.

I’ve been using MyBox exclusively for the past few months and they’ve been so slow that I might end up moving back to Shop & Ship if they’re doing better. Some examples of my recent shipments:

MacBook Pro (21 Days)
– Arrived to MyBox on December 14th
– Delivered to me in Kuwait on January 4th

Sneakers (11 Days)
– Arrived to MyBox on December 28th
– Delivered to me in Kuwait on January 8th

Laptop Case (13 Days)
– Arrived to MyBox on January 13th
– Delivered to me in Kuwait on January 26th

So what US mail forwarding company are you guys currently using and whats the average time it taking to get your items delivered to Kuwait from the US?

I don’t know what took so long but Sonicare electric toothbrushes are now finally available in Kuwait. I used to use Oral B toothbrushes previously but I read so many great things about Sonicare I eventually picked up the Sonicare Flexcare model 3 years ago and haven’t looked back since. Only issue I was having was that I was ordering replacement heads online which was adding to the already expensive cost of the heads, now I can get them locally. If you’re interested they’re available at Xcite.

Page Turner is a local online based store that specializes in selling must reads books and bestsellers. Their collection isn’t huge by any means with their “Fiction” section being the largest, but you could look at it as quality over quantity. They also buy used books although I have no idea where they’re listed on their website. In any case if you’re looking to buy real books and don’t have a Kindle, this could be a good source. Check them out [Here]

I used to post a gift guide on the blog back in the olden days (jeez wtf) so I decided to bring the list back this year again. If you still haven’t purchased a Christmas gift then the list below might help you with some ideas. Everything listed below is available in Kuwait, the links will take you to the place that sells the item. I might add more to the list as I think of stuff but for now these are my recommendations:

Over KD75
B&O BeoPlay A2 Speaker KD120
B&O BeoPlay H5 Earphones KD85
Micro 3D Printer KD169
Pure Fix Brewster Bicycle KD100
Typographic Light Box KD140

Under KD75
B&O BeoPlay H3 Earphones KD50
Crafted Gift Box KD60
Nintendo Classic Mini KD60

Under KD50
AeroPress Coffee Maker KD17
Alive Yoga (1 Month Membership) KD39
Apple TV (4th Gen) KD47
Breville Smart Kettle KD25
Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker KD32.350
Fujifilm Instax Mini8 Instant Film Camera KD25
Nespresso Inissia Espresso Machine KD45

Under KD15
Black Classic Logbook KD8
Brother Personal Label Machine KD9.900
Casio – Retro Gold Watch KD13
Casio – Retro Steel Watch KD8
Eneloop Charger with 4xAA Batteries KD12.950
Klean Kanteen Stainless Bottle KD10
Mossery Dye Notebook KD3
Striped Shopping Bag KD9.750

I tend not to post about instagram businesses mostly because the majority are not that interesting but, @brushed965 is one I think is actually pretty cool. For a price, Brushed 965 will customize your personal items like wallets, purses and sneakers by painting them. Its a great way of customizing a popular item like a Chanel or LV purse. Based on what I’ve seen on their instagram account, their work ranges from simple monograms to detailed illustrated designs like the one above.

If you’re interested to check out their work or to commission a job, check their instagram account is @brushed965

“My Belongings” or “Moqtanayaty” (مقتنياتي) in Arabic is a small store in Kuwait City that sells vintage radios, boomboxes, record players and even cameras. Unlike most places that sell vintage items, all the vintage music players in this store are in working condition. They actually repair vintage music players, VCRs, and even old TVs. So say you have an old radio that stopped working, you could take it to them and they’ll try and fix it for you.

They have a lot of random items around the store as well from 8mm film and 8-track tapes to old telephones and clocks. The store is open from 9AM to 1PM and 4:30PM to 9PM. Here is their location on [Google Maps] and their instagram account is @vintage_radio_

Update: The place has moved, click here!

I was only made aware of this recently by a friend. We were talking about coffee machines and he suggested I order one from Amazon UK and have them ship it directly to Kuwait without using a forwarding mailbox (Amazon ships some items abroad). I told him shipping would be too expensive and wouldn’t be worth it. He then told me that when you ship stuff directly to Kuwait with Amazon UK, they remove the 20% VAT during check out. So I added a few items to my cart and tried to check out and he was right.

Once Amazon removes the 20% VAT and add the international shipping cost to Kuwait, the price basically evens out and you end up paying no shipping or next to nothing for shipping when compared to the original listed price. So you could buy stuff from the UK and get it delivered to you in Kuwait for a cost less than if you lived in the UK and bought it yourself over there. Here are some examples to make this clearer:

Sage Dual Boiler Coffee Machine
Listed Price: KD 382
Price shipped to Kuwait: KD 368

Sage Smart Grinder Pro
Listed Price: KD 70
Price shipped to Kuwait: KD 77

Xbox One S FIFA 17 Bundle (500GB)
Listed Price: KD 94
Price shipped to Kuwait: KD 93

Vitamix Standard Blender (Certified Refurbished)
Listed Price: KD 123
Price shipped to Kuwait: KD 127

So as you can see from above this works better when the item is expensive since the 20% VAT would be worth more than the cost of shipping the item to Kuwait. The items would be shipped using AmazonGlobal Priority which uses one of Amazon’s shipping partners like DHL or UPS. The items would be delivered to your door in Kuwait in around a weeks time. The voltage in the UK is also similar to Kuwait so you won’t need power transformers or anything of the sort. So if you’re looking for an item that you can’t find in Kuwait or you’ve found it but is too expensive, try finding it on Amazon UK, it might come out to be a pretty good deal.

Update: One thing to add, the “Price shipped to Kuwait” includes an “Import Fees Deposit”. Basically the customs fee for importing the item into Kuwait. Once your package gets delivered, Amazon will refund you either the full deposit or partial amount from the deposit. So the actual price you pay is even cheaper than what I have listed above

I’ve posted about ordering supplements online before because of how ridiculously inflated the local prices are. The last time I posted about ordering supplements online I was recommending Amazon but since then I’ve found a new alternative, Sporter.

Sporter has been around for awhile now, even before my previous post in which I was recommending Amazon. But the reason I never wrote about them was because their prices weren’t that much cheaper than the local prices and they were still double that of Amazon. Things have changed recently and I have a theory to why.

I think previously they had a warehouse in Kuwait with the products housed there which meant they had to purchase the supplements from local suppliers with their inflated prices. So the products they sold on their website cost similarly to the products sold locally. Now I’m assuming they shut down their local warehouse since the items are now getting shipped to you directly from the UAE via DHL. So they’re selling the items closer to UAE pricing.

I tried them last week since I ran out of ZMA and they didn’t have my brand available locally. When I looked at possibly getting ZMA from a different brand, their prices were more than double those listed on Sporter. I usually get the Optimum Nutrition ZMA but I checked out “Muscle Pharm Z-Core PM” at the Oxygen store locally and they were selling it for KD14. On Amazon it was KD5 (without tax, shipping and local customs and clearance fees), while on Sporter it was for KD8.24 shipped to Kuwait. So nearly half the price of that of Oxygen and cheaper than if you ordered it from Amazon.

Not everything is priced as competitively but Sporter are now definitely a viable option to check before buying supplements locally. And because the products are coming in from UAE, you don’t pay any Kuwait customs, at leasts thats my theory since I didn’t have to pay DHL anything. Here is a link to [Sporter]

Tavola is one of my favorite kitchen related stores since they carry a number of great brands like WMF, Wilton, Zwilling J.A.Henckels, Le Creuset, Cuisine Art, Bodum, Peugeot mills and Joseph Joseph. The only issue I had with them was that they were located in the industrial area of Shuwaikh past highway 60 and so getting there was always a journey.

But, just before the Eid holidays Tavola opened a new much larger location in Tilal Complex, which is also in Shuwaikh but an easier location to get to. The new location is divided into two floors with all their brands located on the lower floor while the top floor is dedicated to their Wilton baking products as well as two large rooms where they hold baking workshops.

If you want to know what brands they carry the full list is available on their website [Here]. On the other hand if you want to know more on their baking workshops they’re posting the schedules up on their instagram account @tavolakuwait

A couple of days back I posted about Edfa3ly which I said was “the cheapest way to ship lightweight packages from the US”. Well its gonna get even cheaper now since they emailed me last night letting me know they’ve set up a coupon code for my readers to use.

If you use the coupon code “248am” on their website, they’ll waive the international shipping fees and Kuwait customs fee for any order below $50.

Terms and conditions for the coupon:
– Only one coupon can be issued per person per account
– Limited to max $50
– Valid until August 22nd

So if you were planning to order an item using them now would be the perfect time. Here is a link to their [Website]

UPDATE: There have been major changes to the service since this post. Edfa3ly are no longer the cheapest option to ship, they no longer charge by the 100grams and they are now more expensive than PostaPlus.

A couple of weeks back a US mail forwarding company called Edfa3ly contacted me to let me know about their service. Since I had already reviewed countless of similar shipping services, I really wasn’t interested in reviewing another. But, turns out this shipping company had one feature that caught my attention. While services like Aramex’s Shop & Ship and PostaPlus’s MyBox charge per 1/2kg, Edfa3ly charges per 100grams, so I decided to try them out.

If you haven’t used a service like Shop & Ship before, they usually have a minimum weight they charge which is 1/2kg. So if your package weighed 50 grams you would still be charged 1/2kg. The charge varies from company to company, I use PostaPlus currently and they charge KD2.5 for the first 1/2kg while Aramex charges KD3.250. Both PostaPlus and Aramex also charge KD1 on top of that as a customs clearance fee so the cheapest you could ever pay with PostaPlus is KD3.5 and KD4.250 with Aramex. So if your item doesn’t cost much and doesn’t weigh much, it’s not feasible to order it all the way from the States.

I have a bunch of stuff on my Amazon wish list that I need but don’t bother ordering because of this very fact. For example there is a rubber eyecup for my camera, it’s a tiny rubber piece that costs around KD3 so it wouldn’t make sense to order it and then pay at least KD3.5 on top of that for shipping. But since Edfa3ly charge by the 100grams I decided to order it. Unlike other forwarding services, you don’t need to sign up to Edfa3ly. You just go to the website, enter the URL of the item you want to buy, fill out some information and then pay for the item and they will order it for you and ship it to Kuwait. So I did that and this is what the total came out to be for my order:

Item Price: $10.7
Customs Fee: $0.54
Edfa3ly Fees: $0.54
Shipping Fees (1.33 dollar(s) per 100gm): $1.33 (0.05 kg)

Total Price: $13.11

So shipping from Amazon to Kuwait cost me just $2.41! You don’t pay US tax, you don’t pay US shipping and you don’t pay a local custom clearance fee. Instead you just pay the cost of shipping from the US to Kuwait plus an Edfa3ly fee which is 5% of the item cost. I had a package shipped to me and delivered to me in Kuwait within 10 days and just paid around 750 fils for shipping. Thats insane! I’ve got so many tiny cheap stuff I need to buy now like a new Dremel wrench since I lost mine or these tiny plastic rivets for my Datsun. Suddenly so many more things seem accessible.

So if you’re looking to order items that don’t cost much and weigh under 1/2kg, I can’t think of any better alternative. Here is a link to the Edfa3ly website [Link]

Last week I posted about how The Approved Market started home delivery and now they’ve launched their online website alongside that service.

Their website features all their in store products and you can pay online using Knet. Delivery is within 24 hours so if you don’t want to drive all the way to the city to pick up an item, you can now order it online. Here is a link to their [Website]

Thanks Ahmad

If you were hoping the American supermarket chain Whole Foods would open in Kuwait one day, well this is the closest thing you’re gonna get. Wholesome Foods is a new supermarket that Saveco have opened up and not only does it have the same name as Whole Foods, it basically has the same interior look and color scheme along with a similar concept (they mostly carry organic and healthy food products).

It’s not a very large place, but it’s two floors and they have a good variety of items you won’t find at other supermarkets. They’re located in Salmiya in The View building where Marks & Spencer is so the place is pretty close to where I live. Since I’m always frustrated with the lack of product range at Sultan I’ll probably be passing by Whole Foods (can we just call it that?) to pick up whatever I can’t find anywhere else.

If you’re wondering about the prices, they’re similar to Saveco. Whole Foods is open daily from 10AM to 1AM and here is their location on [Google Maps]

The Boulevard park/mall/food plaza is now kind of open. Basically right now there is Chilis and 5Napkins open in the food plaza overlooking the lake and thats about it over there. Inside the mall there is only Caribou Coffee right now but according to an employee there a few other stores are supposedly opening in the next few days. So if you’re thinking of passing by might be a good idea to do it next week since its open but not really open right now. If you don’t know where Boulevard is, here is the link on [Google Maps]

For more pictures of Boulevard plus a list of all the stores opening up, click [Here]

Someone on Kuwikipedia asked if there was a way to get a beIN receiver without going to Hawalli and a person replied back with a link to a local online satellite shop that deliver. I thought this was a useful link to bookmark on the blog for future reference so if you ever want to buy a satellite receiver without leaving your house then check out this [Link]

Link has also been added to the Online Shopping Websites in Kuwait list.