Online shopping has made our lives one click away from owning the coolest and latest gadgets with so many websites selling all kinds of fun stuff. However, have you encountered not being able to access an online store because of country restrictions? Life isn’t fair, but leave it to us to help you find workarounds.

(Image source: Fotolia)

And found them we did. We’ll show you how to first access these country-restricted websites using Tunnelbear. And once you’ve found the object of your desire, we’ll move on to the second part where we show you how you can get your purchases sent to your home, even when you order from sites that do not have international shipping services. After all, what are restrictions but opportunities for you to be creative?

Recommended Reading: Online Shoppers: Why Online Reviews Can Save Your Day

Shortcut to:

• Part 1 – Accessing blocked shopping sites
• Part 2 – Shipping packages using fowarding services

Accessing Blocked Shopping Sites

Certain websites will block access depending on the country you are accessing the site from. For example, the Google Nexus Shop webpage only allows access to a handful of countries while blocking the rest of the world. We previously wrote about 5 programs you can use to access blocked stores in the US.

For this post, we are using TunnelBear as an example.

Step 1 – Install & register

To begin, you have to download and install TunnelBear. Launch the program and register for a free account.

After registering, choose the free option. The free option allows you to surf 500MB worth of data, this is more than enough to purchase and pay for an item.

Step 2 – Confirm your Email & Login

Confirm your email, then proceed to login with the email and password you registered with. The program is very simple to understand. There is an On/Off switch together with 3 toggles that allow you to surf on a US, UK or Canadian internet proxy.

Here’s what happens when we turn on TunnelBear and access the same Google Nexus Shop webpage.

Note: Choosing a country then turning it on means you’ll be using up part of that precious 500MB of data. So use that amount wisely and remember to turn it off after surfing and purchasing the item.

Using Forwarding Services

Got your order? Awesome, let’s just get that shipped to… Darn it. They don’t ship to your country, do they? What’s a poor geek to do?

Use mail and parcel forwarding services like HopShopGo, that’s what. In the following section, we’ll show you how to make use of HopShopGo, as an example, to send an online ordered product to your desired address. Ready? Let’s do this.

To get an idea how HopShopGo works, we ordered a Blu-ray disc from Amazon.

Step 1 – Register with HSG + get an U.S. address

We will start with registering a HopShopGo account. Registering is free but a PayPal account will be required. Upon registration, login and find your U.S. address located at the top left corner as indicated in the screenshot below:

Step 2 – Shop and send to your U.S. address

When asked for a Shipping Address, you can use the US Address you have to get the package shipped there. Then, sit back and wait for your package to arrive at your ‘address’.

Extra info:

• Item cost: $15.09
• Shipping cost: –
• Order date: 12th Jan
• Estimated shipping: 2 – 3 days

Step 3 – Wait for HSG’s notification

You will be notified via e-mail (like the one below) when your package has arrived at your ‘U.S. address’.

Alternatively, you can also login to HopShopGo, click on the 3rd tab "Packages At U.S. Address" (refer to the screenshot below) to find out the status of your package.

Extra Info:

• Order date: 12th Jan
• Arrival (at HSG) date: 15th Jan
• Shipping: 3 days

Step 4 – Ship your Items

If you’ve ordered multiple items, they may arrived at your U.S. address at various different dates. You can ship them together (grouped shipping) or individually. HopShopGo provides free storage of 30 days for each item you ordered.

To ship your packages:

1. Select the 4th tab "Ship + Track"
2. Declare the value of each of the items you’d like to ship.
3. Click the read "Ready to Ship" button.
4. Select your delivery address, delivery speed (Standard/Express) and make payments.

Upon successful payment, you’ll be given an order reference number to track the status of your package (refer to the screenshot below).

That’s it! You’ve just bought yourself something the merchant has not offered to ship to your country. Now sit back and wait for the item to arrive at your doorstep.

Summary

Let’s put things into perspective so you get a better idea of its cost.

Shipping time/cost:

• Amazon to HSG (domestic): 3 days, $2.98
• HSG to destination (international) : 8 days, $11.00

The idea of ‘sticky position’ is to make elements on a website stick and remain visible. Those elements will initially be in their position, and then in the event of scrolling down the webpage, their position will be following the scroll. This practice has been applied wildly including on a few notable websites, such as Facebook and Hongkiat.com.

In Facebook, this technique has been applied to their sidebar; when we scroll down the page, you will find that it follows the scroll and thus remains visible.

Over all the years, this practice is done using JavaScript or jQuery, as follows.

The jQuery Way

In this example, we will create a simple webpage that consists of the header, the navigation and the content.

  <div class="wrapper">  	<div class="header">  		Header  	</div>  	<div class="nav">  		Navigation  	</div>  	<div class="content">  		<p>Candy canes tart pie biscuit. Cupcake liquorice cake dessert tootsie roll   		applicake pastry. ...</p>  	</div>  </div>  

And, we will apply the sticky position to the navigation.

But first, we will define the styles in the stylesheet, like so.

  .sticky {  	position: fixed;  	width: 100%;  	left: 0;  	top: 0;  	z-index: 100;  	border-top: 0;  }  

Then, we will apply that class to the navigation conditionally with jQuery.

  $(document).ready(function() {  var stickyNavTop = $('.nav').offset().top;    var stickyNav = function(){  var scrollTop = $(window).scrollTop();         if (scrollTop > stickyNavTop) {       $('.nav').addClass('sticky');  } else {      $('.nav').removeClass('sticky');   }  };    stickyNav();    $(window).scroll(function() {  	stickyNav();  });  });  

Finally, you can see the demo from the link below.

• View Demo

All right, this way is probably a bit convoluted for those who are not familiar with jQuery as a whole. Alternatively, to achieve the same effect is a bit easier with jQuery – you can use a plugin, ScrollToFixed. Or else, let’s take a look at another way with CSS.

The CSS Way

Recently, Webkit introduced a new position value that is simply called sticky, and it does the same thing the jQuery code above does. However, since this sticky value is still determined as experimental feature, we need to first enable this feature.

Assuming that your current Chrome is version 23 and above, you can type the following in the address bar: chrome://flags. Otherwise, you need to first update it.

Then, find the following section, Enable experimental WebKit features on the list and set this feature to Enable.

In the stylesheet, we simply set the navigation position to sticky. But, since it is only available on Webkit, it will only work with the prefix, like so.

  .nav {  	position: -webkit-sticky;  	top: 0;  	z-index: 1;  }  

Now, the navigation should act in the same way as we did with jQuery. See the demo below in Google Chrome Canary to see it in action.

• View Demo
• Download Source

However, as mentioned above, this feature is experimental and yet applicable in any current browsers.