Here’s how to buy the Pixel Fold in Canada

Google’s Pixel Fold is a highly sought-after device, but unfortunately in Canada, we can’t buy the foldable through normal means.

The tech giant officially only sells the foldable handset in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan, leaving Canadians out of the folding fun. However, a determined MobileSyrup reader got their hands on the Pixel Fold and outlined to me how they did it.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t an official way of buying the smartphone, and your experience may vary, but the reader kept me up to date with each step in the process. I should also mention that I haven’t tried buying the Pixel Fold through this method myself (at least not yet).

Here’s how the reader bought Google’s Pixel Fold in Canada.

How they bought the Pixel Fold

They logged in to the Google Store with their current Google account.

Then they went to the bottom of the page and changed to the U.S. store, and the Fold became available to pre-order.

He added the phone, a case and the free Pixel Watch into the cart.

It’s worth noting that the items will transfer over to your Canadian account and appear in your previously purchased items.

The Google site requires a U.S. address to send the device to. To solve that, they went to shippsy.com. This gave them a U.S. address in Sanborn, New York. The site is a business, and unlike some PO boxes, it receives items and signs for them. Once items arrive at the facility, you then send several documents (the receipt and the price of the items). However, it’s worth noting that customs were not cheap. Shippsy has a $6.99 fee, duties were $33.78, and he had to pay $334.33 in HST (VAT) as well.

Overall, Shippsy adds about a week to your order.

For the payment section, the system accepted the reader’s card at first through Google Pay, but it then required a ZIP code and rejected it. It would not accept any Canadian cards.

To solve this, the reader got a U.S. dollar Mastercard through BMO.  They say this was a “pretty quick and painless” process. Other Canadian banks also offer similar U.S. dollar credit cards. The reader mentions that making payments to pay off the card via their BMO Mastercard was an easy process.

They say the bank recommends you use the numbers for your postal code and add zeros. However, this did not work for them, so they used the most famous zip code, ‘90210,’ which did work.

The bank pre-authorized $1 to show that it was accepted.

They then received the Pixel Fold. The reader is with Telus and has experienced no signal-related problems with the foldable so far. That said, they mention that the Pixel Watch works only on Wi-Fi as Telus does not like the U.S. IMEI code.

And that’s it, that’s the entire process.

Thanks to the MobileSyrup reader who wanted to remain nameless. We appreciate that you kept us up to date with each step in the process.