Phones and laptops, paid for with crypto

Sourced to order, and why that is the honest version

Plenty of sites will show you a live stock number on a $1,200 handset. Very few of them are holding that stock. Sourcing to order is slower and it is the reason a lead time here is stated in days: when your payment confirms, the specific device is purchased, and if it cannot be found you are refunded in full in the coin you paid with before anything ships.

Regional variants are not a detail

The same model number can be a materially different phone in different markets. Android flagships in particular ship different chipsets by region, and cellular band support varies enough that a handset built for one market can lose 5G bands on your local network. Apple's variants differ on SIM hardware — some regions ship dual physical SIM, others are eSIM-only, which matters if you were planning to use a travel data plan.

Tell us your country in the order note and the right variant gets sourced, or you get told honestly that it cannot be.

Import duty is yours, and it is not small

A device crossing a border is an import, and most countries charge duty and VAT on one. That is charged to you by your own customs authority before the parcel is released — no seller can waive it, and anyone offering to declare a phone as a gift to avoid it is proposing you commit an offence on a parcel with your name on it.

Work out what your country charges before you order. An excellent price plus twenty percent plus a handling fee is frequently no longer an excellent price, and it is better to know that now than at the door.

Warranty is geographic too

A manufacturer warranty is generally honoured in the region the device was sold for, not necessarily where you live. In practice a repair on an imported handset can mean shipping it back to the market it came from at your own cost, which turns a free warranty claim into an expensive one. It is not a reason to avoid importing — it is a reason to weigh a regional variant with local warranty support against a cheaper one without, before deciding which is genuinely the better price.

What is actually in the box

The retail package as the manufacturer ships it in that region, which in most markets now means the device, a cable and the documentation, and no wall charger. That is the manufacturer's decision rather than ours, and it catches people out on a first import. If you need a charger, buy one locally — paying to ship a power brick across a border alongside the phone is a poor use of both duty allowance and shipping cost.

The plug on anything that does ship with one matches the region the device was built for, so a US-sourced machine arrives with a US plug. A travel adapter solves it for a few dollars, but if it matters, say which country you are in and the regional build gets sourced where it is available.

How to check what arrives

For phones, put the IMEI into a blocklist checker the day it arrives — a device reported lost or stolen is barred from networks in that country regardless of who sold it. For Apple accessories, put the serial into Apple's own coverage checker, which is the fastest way to catch a counterfeit that photographs perfectly. If anything fails those checks, send it back.