Online shopping in Norway

For online shopping here, I usually use apps for certain local shops where they have a membership program. While for international online shops, I mostly order from the U.S. and U.K. websites :

amazon.com
amazon.co.uk

As a general rule,

When ordering items from foreign online stores, in most cases you must pay 25 per cent VAT when the item arrives in Norway. If you are buying clothes, you also have to pay duty.

If you order goods from abroad where the shipment has a value of less than NOK 350 including freight and insurance costs, it is free of duties and taxes. This means that you do not have to pay VAT or customs duties on the goods.

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE for someone to start an indexed list of online retailers who ship to Norway (and what their shipping rates are, who removes VAT from their prices, and who handles Norwegian VAT versus making you do it on your own)! For a lot of European websites, I end up having to email to ask if they ship here, waiting for a response, and begging them to remove the VAT from the product prices because “no, Norway is not actually a member of the EU.”

For home goods, I just discovered that Wayfair.co.uk and zarahome.com/no both ship to Norway. 🎉

For shopping online, no VAT will be charged if your purchases is less than 350kr (including shipping fee).  But if the package is declared as GIFT, the limit is 1000kr.  BUT there is a catch with regards to the gift.  If package looks like it was shipped directly from the vendor (e.g. logo of brands on the wrapping paper etc), Norweigan custom will not treat it as GIFT even though the sender had declared it as GIFT.

Because of the the above limit, I can only shop in certain website where things are cheap and with free shipping or low shippng charges.

I shop a lot in iherb.  I also love shopping in aliexpress.  I wish I can figure out how to shop in Taobao.   Aliexpress is the international version of Taobao but it is slightly more expensive.