Christmas Toy Shopping?

Can't believe it is already getting to be that time of year.....

This is the first Christmas we have been away from the US.  How do friends/family send gifts from the US to UK?  I know USPS can be quite expensive to mail the items, so I suggested maybe we could find a UK website and they could order from that.

The only website I have found with toys/game is www.amazon.co.uk

Looking for more suggestions....

We didn't go to the US last Christmas, so I did all of my shopping online (Old Navy and Pier1 mostly) and had the gifts shipped to my mom's house for distribution.

I think most of the department stores (Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, etc.) should have toys.  A really good resource for inexpensive toys would be Argos or Littlewoods/Index.

I don't know if Hamleys will allow you to be in the US and ship to the UK, but if they do, they have a lot of nice toys online.

www.hamleys.co.uk

Try Toys R Us and Mothercare websites.

Toys R Us UK will not take a US buyer, then ship to a UK address.  I've already tried that (unless they've changed their policy).  Mothercare would tho.

My MIL sent through toysrus.co.uk but she may have had to call them. I know a few years ago when she tried it wouldn't work. 

Rosie

It was nearly two years ago when we tried.  My best friend in the US wanted to send us some stuff for baby and rather than deal with Customs and international shipping, we thought Toys R Us would be an easy solution.

After she hit the checkout, she couldn't finish processing her order because she wasn't in the UK.  I called their customer services and they said they did this to prevent fraud.  They wouldn't take a phone order either.

Considering the net is supposed to facilitate international shopping, I thought they were rather shooting themselves in the foot. 

It's amazing how many companies have this policy of only US or UK buyers in that country being able to order from their site. Of course I can't recall the names of the sites now, but I encountered it a lot when I first moved here about 4 years ago.