Importers vs importing in SA: one man's quest for a Nexus 5

It certainly is a lot of work.

Just for interest sake: what happens if the phone is dead on arrival, or if the phone needs to be sent in for repairs?
 
I'm in the fortunate position that I have friends visiting from the UK and USA from a few times a year. Although I pay tax-included prices, itis still cheaper than the "import" route
 
I was able to purchase a Nexus 4 last year from the Google Play store using a UnoDNS trail account and my South African MasterCard credit card. If I remember correctly you just have to enter a US address as your credit card's billing address when linking it to your Google Wallet. No verification of the billing address was performed.
 
AstroTurf said:
Or R5648 from Esquire and go fetch it now?
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Indeed, I forgot to mention Esquire. If you're near the Midrand area they could be quite convenient. You will need to make a plan to get a card if you don't have one already.

Excl. VAT?

Mally442 said:
I was able to purchase a Nexus 4 last year from the Google Play store using a UnoDNS trail account and my South African MasterCard credit card. If I remember correctly you just have to enter a US address as your credit card's billing address when linking it to your Google Wallet. No verification of the billing address was performed.
Click to expand...

You got lucky. They stopped accepting SA credit cards at some point, I think.

What did you use for your US billing address?
 
HI Jan, thanks for the very interesting piece.
Could you expound on something for me?

Google seems to flag this, but its main concern seems to be people trying to circumvent its limit of 4 devices per customer.
Once they have reviewed your explanation that you are not trying to bypass the limit, your Google Wallet will be released and your order processed.
Click to expand...

What explanation did you give?
 
ave said:
What explanation did you give?
Click to expand...

I said that I do quite a bit of traveling through the US, but don't have a US credit card and use a mail forwarding service. I therefore used an Entropay credit card along with the address of my US mail forwarder as my billing details.

I added that it was my first purchase of the Nexus 4 and have no intention of buying any more than that. I may also have directed them at my primary Google account for them to verify my story, but I'm not sure if I ended up doing that.
 
Interesting article, in-depth thoroughly enjoyed reading this one. 5/5 :)


If only they accepted PayPal.

Thank goodness have a friend I met on the internet that has bulk buying rights she purchases the stuff I want at staff discount rate, then ships it to me as a gift :)
 
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"Then you will need a virtual credit card and US mail forwarding service. For these I used Entropay and NYBox, respectively."
again with the 'fraudulent' procedure to get a purchase, just like itunes, netflix etc.
why cant these damn foreigners just open it up for us all to purchase like 'normal' legal people, these f'n restrictions are so stupid, especially considering there are many ways around it.
surely our money is good enough? they still get paid in dollas in anycase, even if u use ur ZA card :)

what happens with a 'fraudulent' purchase if something goes wrong with the hardware and you need to return under warranty, or do u expect the warranty to be null ?
 
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I bought my nexus 5 off eBay in December and had it 2 weeks later. In total it cost me 6.5k. I literally just had to pay them. I did nothing with customs and it all worked out great.

I must point out one big flaw in all of this though - don't buy an american one like I did (the D820) because it doesn't operate on our south African LTE frequencies. Unless you're on Telkom mobile. I'm on vodacom which runs on the European LTE bands, so my american version phone doesn't pick up LTE at all. And no, you can't flash it to the D821 baseband because while the modem itself is identical in both models, the D820 has different attenae and amps compared to the D821.

3g/HSDPA work great regardless of which one you get :D
 
Also remember the US version doesn't have LTE that works here. It's best to get one from the UK/EU.
 
This may not be totally related to the article but the other major issue with importing the Nexus devices is the lack of support and spares.

I recently bought a Nexus 7 2013 and had the unfortunate experience of the screen cracking. Trying to find local support to fix the device at a reasonable cost is proving how pointless the Nexus 7 purchase is - it's even made me consider buying an iPad mini!
 
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