Bright idea for ordering Amazon books to Hanzi addresses

[Josh2007]

Surely we all know lots of people in the West.... We only need to pick one to be our Hanzi forwarder, for a fee. This person could order the books to his home in the West, slap on a fee and repackage with our address PDFs with Chinese characters on and send it to China. I know a couple of people who could do this. I wonder how many people on here would use such a service?

[Josh2007]

Or does anyone else have any ideas? A place in China that gets pinyin post with no problem could be our Hanzi forwarder??

[zhwj]

You'd probably get reliable deliveries of Pinyin-addressed Amazon packages if you registered a PO Box at your local office - that'd just be a series of numbers which, together with the local postal code, shouldn't be confusing at all.

An agent is not a bad idea, but for a small-time operation it would mean spending too much time in line at the post office, unless someone had nothing better to do.

Failing that, there are people who set up shops on Taobao providing just the service you are looking for - search for 'Amazon 代购'. Here's one - any Amazon item you want, with just 20 yuan surcharge per order. I haven't used any of those, but I have bought stuff from someone who provided a similar service for books from Taiwan.

[stephanhodges]

I think you're overthinking the problem. I've been getting things delivered via "pinyin" addresses for over a year without any problems other than the postman wants me to "buy" his newspaper for several hundred RMB...

The post office can probably handle things. Have someone send you a postcard or letter to check it out first. The postal (zip) code is the same either way anyways...

I'm in Harbin, but I don't think it should make a difference...

[onebir]

I think you're overthinking the problem. I've been getting things delivered via "pinyin" addresses for over a year without any problems

He's not - post offices in some areas don't seem to do pinyin - there are some threads on it. You're lucky enough to be in a pinyin literate area, but not everyone is in that situation.

A place in China that gets pinyin post with no problem could be our Hanzi forwarder??

That'd be the ideal thing - I think Amazon postage rates to China are pretty good & the internal post here's pretty cheap...

Investigating the taobao option though...

[Josh2007]

Stephan Hodges, I wouldn't be asking if it were not a problem. Don't forget that China is the size of Europe. If things work smoothly in Holland, does that mean they work in the same way in Bulgaria????? You are in Harbin, but there are another 660 cities in China - many of which would just send back a parcel addressed in pinyin without even trying to translate it into Chinese characters...