Buying devices in a Google Play store in another country

In my previous blogpost I outlined a few methods of buying a Nexus 4 in a Google Play store in another country. Today I'm reporting on the actual experience of buying a Nexus 4 in both Germany and the USA.

1. you need a clean browser

Once you know how to install a proxy to get to the country-specific Google Play store, you're only halfway there. If you surf to play.google.com using a browser which had previously loaded the store from another country, you will not be able to shop there. Tip: close all of your incognito browser windows to make sure all cookies are erased. Then open a new incognito window and surf to the play store over your proxy of choice.

2. you need a clean Google Account

You can browse to the Play store and put a product in your shopping cart without being logged in. But when you want to checkout you need to login. If you use an existing account which has previously been active in another country, your checkout will fail. Google will not inform you of the reason, but display a generic error screen as seen below.

3. you need some luck with your credit card

I tried 5 different credit cards in total: 2 old Mastercards, 1 new Mastercard, 1 new Visa card and 1 American Express card. You need to enter the credit card data using a fake US or German (depending on what Play store you are buying in) address. 

Only my new Mastercard and my new Visa card got accepted as a payment method. It is possible that the old cards didn't got accepted since I already used them with their (real) Belgian billing address in another Google account. My American Express card probably supports address verification and got rejected for that reason.

A small sidenote: I managed to use the same Mastercard in both the US and German Play store using 2 different Google accounts. Probably the Google Wallet credit card data only gets synced overnight for address check purposes.

4. pick the cheapest shipping address

To get a German shipping address I used mailboxde.com. It doesn't matter much which provider you choose. Just pay attention to their reates. For my US address I compared 2 options: Borderlinx and Comgateway. Comgateway is slightly cheaper, but the real problem is the Borderlinx shipping state. In the US, some state have a sales tax which will be calculated in your order when you ship to such a state. In the screenshot below you can see that my Borderlinx address was subjected to a sales tax. My Comgateway address was in a sales tax free state, so I chose this address.

Pricing in the US versus EU

Since I managed to get in 2 orders (1 in Germany and 1 in the US) I need to figure out which one to cancel. I'll attempt to make a cost calculation below.

Germany:

€ 358,99 receipt from Play store, including shipping to Germany

€ 2,8 mailbox.de service fee

€ 15,35 DHL shipping fee incl. insurance

= € 377

USA:

$ 369,92 receipt from Play store, including shipping to USA

$40 Comgateway shipping charge to Belgium

$2,6 insurance charge of 0,65% by Comgateway 

$4,8 fuel surcharge

$21 duty 5%

$88 VAT 21%

$10 estimated DHL customs handling fee

$536 TOTAL 

= €410

So it seems the US order will be €33 more expensive. Since it will also take longer, I will cancel the US order.

UPDATE 07/01/2013:
My Nexus 4 finally arrived. The total cost was €13,49 + €358,99 = €372,48