Buying product in the US and Living in Australia

[knot2old56]

Hi

I have been buying product in eBay for 14 years now on eBay.com within the USA.  I have an excellent buying record with eBay and I ship within the USA.  But i do live in Australia.

I buy mostly Vintage Otagiri Music Boxes and I am also writing a collectors & sellers guide to Otagiri Music Boxes.   But the market for second hand music boxes is in the USA now.  

I have a problem with buying in the USA and that is that the Global Buying service is not suitable for me.  Thats becasue I buy too much product for it to be financially viable to purchase goods with the exchange rate etc.  When I buy items I then consolidate the small cartons into one or more large cartons and this cuts the freight costs down   So I have been forced over the last few years to use these parcel forwarding companies. 

You buy product, it gets shipped to the address you are allocated, they store it,  then when you are ready you consolidate the items you want to ship,  The consolidation is handled by the parcel forwarding companie.  Im sorry to say some of the people running these facilities are cowboys and just dont know how to pack goods, and if you run into problems their contact centres are in Asia, Middle East etc..  Therin is my problem - I have run into problems a couple of times now.  They packing the goods badly, one shipment 18 months ago arrived with 15 smashed music boxes. If you dispute the packing and say its substandard then they want you to pat extra to fix the shoddy job they already did.  If you dispute anything they ignore you, you try to ring them they dont answer the phone,  so basically you are in stuck betweena rock and a hard place. 

I am hoping that someone can steer me towards an economical storage facility that has storage facilities, and also a capacity to be able to pack the items properly and safely for shipment to Australia.  I also would like to choose my own freight company. Im having a lot of trouble finding such a place.  Currently I have over 100 music boxes in storage and I want to move storage facilities as I have issues again with bad packing, no customer service from the parcel forwarding as anyone at the storage facility is not capable of handling issues.  Any help to find somewhere would be gratefully accepted.

[rfmtm]

As far as recommendations, that would be tough, but I would probably look for a smaller shipping service that could give you more personal service.  You also want to find one that is either in a no sales tax state or zone, or has a tax exempt certificate, otherwise you end up paying sales tax on everything.

If your items are all about the same, specify a particular size and type of box and packing material that would make good packing more consistent for a standard inner box that matches up with a standard double walled outer (master) carton that a particular number of these inner boxes would fit in securely.