An online store of “sustainable” items does not send packages to Portugal, as it considers postal services to be unreliable. Portugal is placed by the Australian company Healthish at the level of countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, South Africa, North Korea, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, which is a justification that the services sent from these countries are not currently “selective”.

The information was exposed in recent days by Portuguese users on Reddit and confirmed by i on the website of the Melbourne-based company, which sells reusable bottles and accessories and says it aims to “create products that help embrace a healthy lifestyle” . “It’s something we live and breathe every day to help you”, they emphasize on the official website.

I tried to contact the company to understand what motivated the inclusion of Portugal in this list of countries, but did not have an answer by the end of this edition. The company says it uses DHL’s services.

The situation was shared in a discussion of problems with orders, which have been made public more often in recent months. According to Expresso, CTT currently has half a million orders in its warehouse and guarantees that since July 1st, it has handled more than 450 thousand orders arriving from outside the European Union (EU).

Searching for other sites, it is not common to find an exclusion of this kind, but there are others that have been talked about. The best known cases are of brands that do not ship orders to the Azores and Madeira archipelagos – such as Lego – and, in early September, in an intervention in the Assembly of the Republic, the Social Democrat deputy, Paulo Neves, considered it “unfair and unacceptable “that the Portuguese who live there do not have access to all electronic commerce.

Speaking to a new ANACOM administrator, Neves recalled that there is a principle of “Territorial Continuity” that must be respected in what concerns communications carried out by air and sea, but also in those that take place in a virtual environment.

4.8 million Portuguese shop online More than 4.8 million Portuguese – 56.8% of the universe of products over 15 years old and residing in mainland Portugal – are fans of online shopping and, of these, 12.1% shop at least once a week and 42% purchase products online at least once a month. This information was published, at the end of July, by Marktest’s E-Commerce Barometer.

If on the one hand UberEats, Aliexpress and Continente are the online stores most cited by the Portuguese, Wish, followed by Aliexpress and eBay are those that generate the highest level of dissatisfaction, according to the survey conducted in March and May 2021 through an interface to 2,262 belonging.

On the other hand, Decathlon, Wook and Amazon, Fnac and Zippy stores achieve the best consumer satisfaction index. “With slight fluctuations in the evaluation according to the gender of respondents: among women, the Top 3 is filled by Zara, Wook, Decathlon and Fnac (ex-Aqueo), while men praise Decathlon, Amazon and Bertrand more”, she says to Marktest.

However, months earlier, according to data revealed in January by Revolut, and collected between March 1 and December 31, 2020, the Portuguese spent more than triple on international e-commerce sites than on domestic ones. Despite this, it is known that e-commerce in pages registered an increase with expenses three times higher in national brands when compared to the same period of the previous year.

The financial application based in the United Kingdom, which has more than 500 thousand users in the national territory and more than 13 million globally, states that these consumers managed to save more money, having on December 31, 2020 double the value that saved on March 1, 2020.

The potential of the international virtual address One of the possibilities of consumers facing companies that do not ship to Portugal is to create an international virtual address, or in the case of Healthish it would not work, since Oceania is not yet integrated in CTT’s virtual international address creation service. But if you are wondering about the possible ways for purchases from the USA, Spain and France to reach you, this may be a good choice.

In simple terms, this service allows you to create an international virtual address in the countries mentioned and, after activating the account, a virtual address is generated just for you, which you must define as the delivery address when placing your order. The store will then send the purchase to that address and CTT will transport it to your home or to the CTT Point you previously selected.

The price is the sum of two different values ​​- a fixed and a variable that depends on the weight of the objects – and it does not allow the sending of several products in the same order, bearing in mind that each one must correspond to a package and a order.

Delivery time depends on the country of origin of your purchase. You can use your Visa or Mastercard credit card to make the corresponding payment. So far, on the Portal da Queixa, this modality completes 13 complaints. Of these, 10 were resolved.