Ordering Valve Index From Australia

[33Doritos]

Hey there,

I've been trying to get an Index for a while now, however I live in Australia, which means that it can't be shipped here directly.
Normally all you would have to do is change your steam store country using a VPN, and then use an external postal company (such as Auspost) to Australia with a slight fee.
However, Valve has decided to complicate this by hardening up the ability to change your country. You now have to make a purchase with a billing address in the country you wish to switch to before you can change. The problem with this is that I don't own an American billing address.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, but if this doesn't work, I have one more option that I could try.

[_I_]

best way is if you can pay a family member or trustworthy friend who can buy and ship it to you

[Bob the Boomer]

I do not understand valve not selling to aus, they already make us pay regional tax on games. Pretty poor effort on their part.

[hawkeye]

Even if you did ship it via a freight forwarder like hopshopgo you could get picked up when using it, if access is restricted to NA. Although you'll see ads about VPNs defeating country blocking they usually don't now as traders block the VPN servers and also only allow US credit cards, even paypal. Also if gst hasn't been paid, you would be charged gst plus duty (if applicable) and a customs handling fee of $100 approx - and wait about 6 weeks while the package sits in a customs bond store for border force to clear it. Overall it took a package I bought recently about 3 months to arrive on my doorstep. It took a month to get out of the US and about 2 to get through customs.

[33Doritos]

Originally posted by _I_:

best way is if you can pay a family member or trustworthy friend who can buy and ship it to you

Did exactly that, luckily my uncle lives in Canada, still meant to take up to 8 weeks just to get to him. I think that this is one of the first expensive and physical things that Valve has attempted to sell, so they probably don't have their production line organised very well, so worldwide shipping might become a reality if they start to sell more physical products.