For a die-hard online shopper like me (and also many of you here, I know who you are!), there’s nothing to make my heart beats faster than the sentence “Free International Shipping”. First of all, not all online retailers ship to Indonesia. We’re often excluded by ebay sellers – for whatever reason, or when they do ship, it’ll cost us an arm and a leg. That’s why many of us love ASOS for its free international shipping with no minimum purchase. But as lovely as asos.com is, their main business is fashion, not beauty.
So I’ve been shopping around (pun intended) for beauty retailers with free shipping service, and I happily found beautybay.com. They must just extended their free shipping to Indonesia in the recent years, because I can remember that 2 years ago they only provided free shipping to Singapore. Beauty Bay is closer in spirit to Sephora, as in a provider of mid to upper scale beauty products, rather than to beauty.com, which provides a mix of drugstore and department store products. It carries brands like Stila, Urban Decay, Tarte, Cargo, Bare Mineral, and YSL in its makeup section, and Ahava, Alpha H, Dr. Brandt, Mario Badescu, Peter Thomas Roth, Perricone MD and Talika among its skin care and bath line up. Price wise, they’re comparable with other retailers, but the free shipping facility is what makes it the winner in my book.
For my first order, I intentionally ordered small liquid products to see the quality of their shipping service. I bought 2 bottles of hair products (about 50 ml each) which cost me about USD 15 combined. At the time I made the purchase (May 31, 2013), they only took credit cards as a form of payment. I found this quite a hassle, since my credit card requires additional verification process for international online transaction. I much prefer to do a transaction with Paypal, and I was very happy to see the Paypal’s logo when I checked back recently.
My items arrived in little less than a month. 2 little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, packaged in a small cardboard box filled with peanut shipping. Too bad, I was too excited to check on my purchases that I forgot to take a picture of the packaging. But I can attest that they are well packaged and arrived safely.
With this positive first experience, I feel more confident to place another order from Beauty Bay. Anyone with me? 😉
ps: feelunique.com, another British retailer, also claims to provide free international shipping worldwide. Unfortunately, Indonesia is not yet included on their list of countries served. I’ve made an inquiry to them, and hopefully, soon they’ll be able to ship to Indonesia for free. Fingers crossed, ladies. We could use more online shops!
