When it comes to shopping online, the real problem in not the US mail. Or even mail from other countries, which can be sketchy. It's who you order from and how they do things.
For example, I collect DVDs and Blu-Rays. And like many people, I would buy some of them online, sometimes from Amazon. Over the years I learned, you don't just click on a product you want to buy, you have to read about it first. Regardless of who you buy things from, it really pays to look for who's the seller, where will it be shipped from, and when will it be shipped.
I found a six part TV series called Wild Russia on YouTube back in something like 2010. It wasn't about the cities or the country in general. This was exactly what the name implied it to be, the wilderness areas of Russia, made by the masters of outdoor / nature films, BBC Nature. I looked for a DVD of that series and found several different ones exist, but none for sale anywhere.
After over 10 years, I found a copy on Amazon for $20, marked as on sale from $40. I wanted so bad I just clicked it without looking into the specifics. It was Amazon, after all. It turned out to be on back order, that was the first problem. Thinking that I had spent $20 already (which was not the case, on Amazon you don't pay until it ships) I kept looking for a shipment email. It took a over a month, but eventually it shipped. From
London on a container ship. Two months later I finally got it.
Like a kid on Christmas, I ripped open the package and popped a DVD into my DVD Player, but it wouldn't play. It was Region 1, we are Region 2. I remembered you can play DVDs from other regions on a Region Free DVD Player, and I bought a cheap one at Wally World for $25. It was Region Free, but there were no English captions, and the audio was in German. Into it for $45 now I was pretty upset.
I called Amazon, and they said if they had sold it to they would give a refund. But of course, they didn't. They said to contact the seller, who of course wanted more than I paid for it to send it back. I thought oh, well, it was only $20.
About that time I got an email from a friend in Neuss, Germany and when I wrote him back I told him about it. Over the next few days we came up with a solution. He said he had bought a copy of that set and the audio was in English. He copied the audio files and sent them to in email, but said I didn't need to do the same because he speaks English. He also said
"Dies wäre ein guter Zeitpunkt, um Deutsch zu lernen." (This would be a good time to learn to speak German.)
He said I would need to extract the video from the six DVDs, and name each one after the title, and name each corresponding audio file exactly the same, and then merge them. I ended up with 6 working English copies in MP4 form.
My point is...
Read the fine print.
Here's
Wild Russia: Episode 4, Siberia, for you if you're interested...
