How I bought a Fire tablet on Amazon from Nigeria

Posted on Friday June 24, 2016 at 17:37:25:

Amazon is a great shopping website where you can find many electronic devices. One of such devices that I'be bought is the affordable Amazon Fire tablet. It's a kind of Android tablet specially designed for Amazon that allows you to access their appstore, do shopping on Amazon, access their other content as well as do other things that tablets can do such as browsing, emailing, computing and so on.

Tablets are like a light version of a laptop and if you think that a laptop is really more portable than a desktop computer, then you'd say more when you start using tablets.

I bought the 2 Amazon fire tablets at $39.99 each even though it was originally listed at $49.99 per unit. I was able to buy it at a discount because they were doing a sales promo they were running for a special day. You can save money shopping on Amazon during their special days such as Christmas, Easter, Independence day, Father's day, Mother's day and so on. They have a lot of such special days during the year when they would offer a discount on special items and the Fire tablet seems to be mostly favoured.

Since Amazon wasn't shipping their Fire tablets directly to Nigeria yet, I had to first send it to my US warehouse since I've already setup one with my US shipping agent. Yes, I have a US shipping service that allows me to receive goods that I've purchased from US merchants and what they do is give me an address to use while they charge me a fee anytime I want my package to be delivered to my address in Nigeria.

After I purchased the Amazon Fire tablets from Amazon, I had them sent to my US address and when it was delivered, I got a notification by email that a package has been received at my box and I noticed that it weighed about 2.20 lbs after logging into my online account. I checked for the international shipping cost to Nigeria using their billing estimator and noticed that I would be charged an extra $80 (apart from my yearly membership fee) for the item to be sent to my address in Nigeria through DHL. The fee was a bit different for other companies such a Fedex and UPS.

I made a request for my packaged to be shipped and it was accepted while my debit Mastercard was charged for it as I got an email alert.

My package was sent to me through DHL and I was able to track it on their website using the tracking number given to me. My Amazon fire tablets arrived within 5 working days and I was happy to start using it.

My item was identified as Computer tablets and I was charged a custom duty of about 5% of the C.I.F.(Purchase cost + Insurance + Freight) when my item arrived Nigeria. There was an extra charge of 5% for VAT plus other extra charges making it a total of about 13.5% I had to pay to get my item released from the customs. DHL notified me about the charges and I had to make payment into their bank account before my tablets were finally delivered to me the following day. I noticed that the exchange rate used by the Nigerian Custom for my imported package was N177 per US dollar since it was like an official rate. Amazon however charged my Naira card something close to black market price at N208 per US dollar when I purchased the tablets from them.

Based on my experience, the total cost of purchasing the 2 tablets from Amazon included the purchase cost, the shipping cost, 5% import duty, 5%, extra 3.5% on other charges and that brought the unit cost per item to about $91 even though I purchased it at $39.99 from Amazon.

I've been using the Fire tablet and I'm happy with it. It works pretty well, fast and I can also side load apps to it apart from the numerous apps from the appstore.

I was able to buy tablets from Amazon and receive it in Nigeria because I have an acceptable Naira Debit card and a US shipping address.