15 February 2007, 13:58 in

Buying sports supplements in Australia

At the moment I am pretty active with either grappling, knife fighting, or weights training pretty much every day of the week in conjunction with full-time work. I eat a lot of food, but to maximize my strength and muscle growth gains I also use supplements such as protein powder, creatine, and glutamine.

While I don’t think you can place a price on good health, these supplements are fairly expensive, so I try to keep my costs down. All the local shops I’ve been to in Perth charge like wounded bulls, so I began looking for cheaper alternatives.

For a while I was a happy customer of the US-based Bodybuilding.com. They have the lowest prices I have ever seen, and stock a vast range of products. Getting the items shipped to Australia adds to the cost substantially, but you still end up paying a lot less compared to buying from retail stores here. Unfortunately issues with Australian Customs Service (ACS) have made the process unworkable for me. Seemingly at random, ACS would reject an order for some stupid reason. I have had them reject the exact same products that are available here on the shelves of Australian stores, claiming that I need to give them a manufacturer’s declaration about the product’s ingredients. It feels as if ACS are trying to make it as difficult as possible for people to bring anything into the country themselves. If an order is rejected by ACS and sent back to Bodybuilding.com, fortunately they will issue a refund, but not for the shipping cost. I just lost a fair bit of money when two large orders that I placed in conjunction with some friends got rejected.

So with Bodybuilding.com no longer viable due to problems with ACS, what else is there? I have used CityHealth.com.au in the past; they have cheap prices (for Australia) and a flat rate $8 shipping cost per order. However I can’t stand their crappy website which returns the same results multiple times when you search.

Yesterday I came across MrSupplement.com.au. They are based in NSW, have reasonable prices, free shipping on orders over $150, and a good range of products. In addition they have an excellent website which makes it easy to browse or search their product range. I placed an order late last night and it shipped today. So far, so good.

  1. To follow up, the order was sent in two parts. After ordering on Wednesday, one part arrived on Friday and the other on Monday. All good.


    — Phil    Feb 20, 09:29 am    #
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