How to order from a French website: the step-by-step guide

Ordering from a French shop when you live elsewhere is not hard once you have done it once. It fails the first time because two or three fields expect something you do not have, and because nothing on the page tells you which one is the problem. Here is the whole thing in order.

Before you start: the one thing to prepare

You need a French delivery address. Not a trick, not a workaround — an actual postal address in France, in your name, where a courier can hand over a box. That is what a forwarding service gives you: an address at a warehouse, plus a personal identifier so your parcel is matched to you among everyone else's. What it is and how it differs from the post office's mail redirection is covered here.

Get that first. Every other step assumes it exists, and it takes about two minutes to set up.

Step one: check the shop actually sells to French customers online

Sounds obvious, and it is where a surprising number of attempts die. Some French sites are showrooms with no checkout at all; some sell only in physical stores; some run a separate storefront for your region with a shorter catalogue than the French one. Put an item in the basket and go to the delivery screen before you invest any effort.

Step two: fill in the delivery address

Enter the French address you were given, exactly as given, and put the personal identifier where the form has room for it — usually the second address line, or the "company" or "care of" field. If there is no second line, append it to the street line. That identifier is the single thing that must not be dropped: without it your box arrives at a warehouse with no idea whose it is. The field-by-field detail is here.

At this point the country selector should stop being a problem, because you are no longer asking to be delivered abroad. Domestic French delivery is often free above a small basket, and always cheaper than international.

Step three: the payment page, where it usually breaks

This is the step that catches people. French sites run fraud checks that compare the country of your card with the country of your address, and a mismatch is refused automatically, with no explanation. If your card is rejected instantly, without your bank sending you a confirmation code, that is almost certainly what happened.

Three things help, in this order. Enter your real billing address, the one your bank holds — never invent a French one, that is what triggers the refusal you are trying to avoid. Try a card from a different network. And if the shop offers PayPal or a wallet, use it: those carry their own trust signal and clear more often.

If it still fails, the shop is not going to accept your card today, and no amount of retrying will change it. That is the point where somebody buys on your behalf with a French card, which is the second half of what services like ours do.

Step four: what happens to the parcel

The shop delivers to the warehouse as a domestic parcel. It is received, opened, checked and weighed. Then it waits — with us, free of charge for 45 days — while you decide whether to send it on alone or to gather a few more things first.

That decision is worth two minutes of thought, because it is where the money is.

Two ways to get a parcel to you

You order yourself. On French sites that accept your card, you enter your FrenchShopper address at checkout. To the shop you're a French customer; the parcel lands at our warehouse, we receive it, and we forward it to you. The address is free and comes with your account.

We buy for you. On Vinted, Leboncoin, and any seller who only ships within France or rejects a foreign card, you send us the link: we check it, quote it, and once you've paid, we buy with our own French account and card. The details are here.

Either way, your items wait for free for 45 days in our warehouse so you can gather several — and everything leaves in one box, with one shipping charge.

What the last leg costs, and how to make it cost less

Shipping is priced on weight and size, and carriers charge on whichever is higher: the actual weight or the volumetric weight, which is what a big half-empty box is billed as. So a lone lightweight item in a large carton is the worst case you can construct.

The rule that decides everything: the price of a shipment rises far more slowly than its weight. One shirt costs almost as much to send as six. Which means the single most effective thing you can do is order a few things before shipping anything. How consolidation works in practice.

Two costs are never included by anyone, and be suspicious of a service that claims otherwise: duties and taxes in your own country, which are assessed on arrival and collected by the carrier. Estimate the shipping from the weight and your country before you commit.

What not to bother ordering

Aerosols, alcohol, perfume in most cases, loose lithium batteries, and anything organic into strict countries. These are refused by carriers rather than by shops, so you would only find out at the end. The full list is here, and it is worth thirty seconds before you fall in love with something.

Frequently asked questions