The Google Store sells phones, Chromebooks, smartwatches, and smart speakers (or whatever you want to call things like Google Home), among other products. But the Google Store isn’t available in all countries.
Up until recently, that’s meant if you wanted to buy Google WiFi while living in an unsupported country, your best bet was to get a friend living abroad to order it for you and ship it.
But now Google offers a way to buy items from any country’s version of the Google Store. All you need is a valid shipping address in the country where you want to order from.
In other words, Android Police’s Rita El Khoury can order items from the US Google Store, even though she lives in Lebanon. Sure, she can’t get anything shipped directly to her home that way, but she can have it sent to a friend in the US.
Google positions the new feature as a way to send gifts across the globe, but it also opens the door to buying something for yourself if you live in a place where the Google Store doesn’t exist.
Sadly, this only applies to the Google Store, and not to the Google Play Store, which is the digital marketplace where Google sells apps, games, music, movies, and eBooks. Some of those digital items may only be available in certain regions, and prices may vary from country to country. The new Google Store country picker won’t let you get around those restrictions.
The title is a little misleading I think.
Guest seems to work for me…
Could it be browser related?
I’ve been troubleshooting this today. Hopefully if it works for you, that means I’ve fixed it 🙂 Tough to tell, because it usually works when I try it, but I’ve gotten several reports from people unable to get past the captcha in the last day or two.
Great. I have actually wished this was possible in the past (when they’ve had good sales and I’ve needed a new product. Thankfully I have an uncle willing to act as an in-between.
“Now you can buy from Google Store in any country”
it is a bit of an overstatement… I can actually count the number of countries :
https://store.google.com/countrypicker
The point is you can buy when you’re *not* in one of those countries by picking one where you want to have the items shipped. It’s definitely not perfect, since it’s only useful if you:
a) Have someone in that country who can receive an order for you (or to whom you want to send a gift)
b) Just want to check the prices from abroad
But that’s not the list of places where you have to be located in order to buy. It’s the list of Google Store countries you can now order from no matter where you are.
Finally! It was always a pain to access info on Google Store from outside the US…
PS: Brad: I could not comment as “Guest” due to a Captcha error. That’s why you only get “Members” comments….
Weird. I had issues with the default Captcha, but thought those had been resolved when I switched to using Google ReCaptcha. Can you email me a screenshot showing me the captcha box you see so I can figure out what’s going on?
If you don’t already have my email, you can tweet me or send me a note using our comment form and I’ll email you back.
https://liliputing.com/contact
I suppose this means that all those princes and such who can’t get their money out of their country and so will give me a big finders fee to help out can now just order a bunch of Google stuff to a warehouse and sell it on E-bay to get their money out of the country.
That’s too bad. I was going down to Western Union tomorrow to send out the document and processing fees and was gonna make like $100,000 in the end. Oh well.
I think you know that things like Google Wifi are called ‘routers’, Brad. 😉
Whoops. I meant to write “Google Home.”
Thanks!
Yeah, that won’t happen for digital goods because Google doesn’t have the rights to sell/show/play/distribute them in those countries.