The best Package Forwarding Service in the USA (Shipito, Opas or Viabox)?

Are you in need of having packages forwarded from a US address to your current location somewhere outside the USA? Which is the best package forwarding service in the USA?

As you might know we are not located in the USA, but this blog in run from Europe. Lots of our articles have been born out of a desire and a need to virtually reside in the USA. As a result we have written lots of articles about how you can watch US Netflix outside the USA, how you can watch Amazon Prime, CBS, NBC, Hulu and several other similar services.

But, what can be done if you want to order something from a US shop (like Amazon.com), but you can not do it as the goods can not be delivered to addresses outside the USA? A Package Forwarding Service is the solution. They do not only give you an address in the United States, but they also do the work of having it sent to your actual address somewhere in the world outside the United States.

About the package forwarding services

There are quite a lot of package forwarding services, but in this article we have tested three of the most famous. Viabox is the provider which should be the cheapest based on the estimations they show at their website. But, are they the cheapest when the rubber hits the road? Opas has a website we really have a hard time liking. But, are they services and prices better than their website? And what about Shipito? This test has of course not been based only on whether or not we liked the websites or not, but we have ordered a similar package to all three package forwarding services and then checked out what prices we got for forwarding it to the same destination in Europe. The result was very interesting!

Before you go on there are a few things you should know about package forwarding services.

If the company you buy from lets you order a package to your home address outside the USA that is normally cheaper than using a package forwarding service. You should therefore use this first of all when you order something that can not be delivered to an address outside the United States.
Do not expect shipping to Europe and other continents to be a cheap experience. Do not be surprised if the cheapest shipping method using any of these end up around 40 USD or more. But, read on the real review to see how our example ended up!
Most services are free to use and you can get a US address for free. They later add a fee for actually sending the package, and some of the companies use a fee for consolidating packages.
- Consolidating packages is when you get several packages delivered to the same address. Consolidating these packages mean that the company will make on big package from the different packages, and thus you will save shipping costs having them all forwarded together instead of one by one.
The forwarding prices is based on the size of the package and the weight. It is not impacted by the value of its content, simply the size. That is why a giant book with a little weight can cost way more to forward than a heavy tool with a smaller size.

Opas, Viabox or Shipito? Which is the best package forwarding company?

Let us say that our test was very small, but we have used the same providers earlier and thus we were not at all surprised by the end result we got. So, the example we use here is based on the one similar order we had delivered to all three addresses (the Opas address, the Viabox address and the Shipito address). But, our results and experience from earlier simply confirmed the results we got during this single test!

What did we order?

We did not want to spend lots of money and that is why we ordered a children’s book packed with stickers. The price was 3,5USD and it was delivered for free to the three addresses.

Delivery time to the package forwarding companies

We did not even think about this before we ordered, but the package we ordered reached its destinations by the package forwarding services like this:

Shipito: package was received in 1 day
Viabox: package was received after 3 days
Opas: package couldn’t be delivered at first, but after 4 days it was delivered

To be honest we did not even think about the difference in the delivery times once we ordered, but if time is of the essence Shipito would have won this test easily!

The package has arrived – now what?

Once the package arrives to your virtual address in the USA you get an email telling you about the fact. You will then have to visit the Shipito, Opas and the Viabox website to write a declaration about the content and the value of the package. Once this is done you can decide to ship it to your address in Europe or elsewhere. That is what we wanted to and here are the results!

Forwarding package from USA to Europe with Opas

For some reason Opas was by far the worst when it came to this process of declaring the goods and getting a price estimate. After declaring the goods we wanted to get a price estimate, but we did not get one. Instead we had to choose what we were interested in. We selected the cheapest possible price. After that we had to wait for one day before an estimate was made.

Best Opas package forwarding price: 49,5 USD

That was the cheapest they had to offer for forwarding the package to our address in the European Union. We do not blame them for this, but paying 49 USD to forward a package with a value of 3 USD feels very strange! Of course the value of the package could have been 1000 USD and the forwarding price would have been 49 USD.

Forwarding our package from USA to Europe with Shipito

Shipito got their hands on the package first and they immediately give you price estimations after declaring your goods. They do not consolidate your packages for free, so you will either need a monthly subscription (10 USD per month) or an annual subscription (50 USD per year) to enjoy this service. But, if you only want to forward one package at the time that is not needed.

Best Shipito forwarding price: 9,31 USD

Shipito has lots of shipping methods available. For our package they offered a simple US mail option which is by far the cheapest. This only costed us 9,31 USD. This does not have any insurance policy to it however and it takes a much longer time for the package to be received. And you should also know that this option is not available for all packages you receive at Shipito. But, their next shipping methods costing 29 USD and 31 USD are way better, quicker and with insurance, but still much cheaper than the OPAS method.

Forwarding our package from USA to Europe with Viabox

We had great expectations to Viabox, after all they were to have the very best prices (according to their website). We added the information about the content of the package and the price. Viabox immediately came up with a price offer (just like Shipito) and these the best price we got was….

Best Viabox forwarding price: 45,24 USD

The Viabox price was cheaper than Opas, but still way more expensive than the three best offers from Shipito. Now consolidation comes for free with Viabox, but considering the prices you do better subscription to Shipito for a month, as the shipping costs are so much lower.

Viabox has one service that could help the price. They offer to repack your incoming package. Hopefully doing so the size will decrease and so will the final price. We tried this one time earlier and a little toy car which they wanted to forward for more than 100 USD only costed 60 USD with their help. But to be honest, that is still a crazy high price.