I spent $333.82 for shipping and handling, as printed on the Amazon shipping invoice. I had the shock of my life when I saw it.

There are 7 items on that invoice. Each item should cost only US$6 for shipping, and then there's the box charge. So total shipping should be under $50 to my country.

What happened was, I bought a lot of stuff. Many are still on pre-order. Amazon would sometimes ship part of the order for those items in stock.

While part of the orders are being prepared to be shipped, I decided to cancel the other part as I found new stuff I wanted to add to the order. You can't add new items to the order that was already placed since there's no Update button. The only way was to cancel and place another order. I did just that and somehow all the shipping charges from those canceled items got moved to the preparing-to-ship items.

I didn't notice the discrepancy until I stared at the physical invoice inside the box.

Of course I contacted Amazon on this and they refunded the excessive shipping charges so I just paid the correct amount.

But I still had to pay some import taxes for packages that exceed SGD$400 in my country. Well, at least the tax is way less than the shipping charges.

To end on a positive note, even with all these unnecessary erroneous charges, I still paid less for the books compared to what I would have paid buying them in Singapore.