¡Comprando directamente en Shein con HBD desde Cuba! | Buying directly from Shein with HBD from Cuba! [ES/EN]

Debo decir que quedé muy satisfecho y reforcé, por mucho, ese sentimiento de autonomía e independencia económica que adquirí cuando empecé a incursionar en el mundo de la web3. Por otro lado, nada de esto hubiese sido posible, exacto, sin Hive y todo lo que ello implica. Decir, además, que esta no será la última vez que haga una compra así, por el contrario, ahora tengo en mente nuevas acciones. Y es que nunca había sido tan fácil comprar barato cosas que, si las hay no son las que uno quiere, y si son las que uno quiere, en Cuba, son carísimas.

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English version

Hello Hive Cuba. Today I come to give you the honeys on an idea I had and it worked out for me. It is about a purchase made by me directly from Shein, that is to say, absolutely without intermediaries and paid at the real price of the articles.

Around the beginning of the year, my sister had the idea of getting into the business of people who import products from Shein to sell here, as our other sister lives in the United States and was going to send them to her, but it was really an exploration because we didn't know anything about the procedure, except for her sister-in-law who did have experience. That's how she told me about the possibility that if I wanted something, I could tell her and I would only have to pay her the exact price of the product and the customs weighing.

The problem came when it was time to find the dollars to pay them into her PayPal account and make the purchase. The entry of the cash would be done by a third party who would take them in exchange for the money to be paid into the PayPal account given to him. Up to that point, my chances were to be able to obtain MLC or CUP by selling HBD, but I found it very difficult to get dollars and that person only accepted the greenback.

I remember that in those days, @theinfiltred, who is among my WhatsApp contacts, made a promotion in his statuses about a virtual shop; a startup, TecnoCuban. This shop, among the products it offers, has virtual Visa debit cards of various amounts that can be paid for in the cryptocurrencies it accepts. It is known that this card is accepted by any online merchant in the United States.

It was then that I began to make associations of ideas and joining one end with another it occurred to me that instead of getting tangled up buying dollars with the inflation we have in the country, and making a purchase with so many intermediaries, I could, instead, buy whatever I wanted with my own money and only depending on my sister who lives in that country for the shipment. Obviously, by my own money I mean HBD. Therefore, I contacted TecnoCuban support to ask if they accepted this digital asset, since, despite not being on the list of those supported by them, they gave the possibility of communicating it to the team to find a solution.

So I did, and then the possibility they gave me was to pay in satoshis (sats), which for those who do not know what I'm talking about, each satoshi is a fraction of Bitcoin (BTC); it is a digital asset that is used for micropayments in the Lighting Network (LN), which in turn is a second layer on the Bitcoin network and is characterised by the extreme speed of transactions and low fees.

I didn't wait any longer and decided to buy a 50 USD Visa. To do so, I used the platform V4V.app to buy satoshis, since, as the official website states, it is a Bitcoin LN wallet for Hive where "you can pay any Lightning bill or send BTC sats to any Lightning address". I had never done a transaction as large as this before, and I was surprised at the low fees they charge, that practically everything was kept at 1 x 1.

That's how I got the necessary amount of sats to pay for the Visa card in question, and followed the steps in the online shop to buy it. Once obtained, I went to Shein -always using VPN because of the restrictions we all know about-, and started shopping. Once again I was surprised by how cheap the products are here and the facilities offered by the platform to reduce them even more with the help of coupons and discounts almost for the sake of it. If at first the 50 USD seemed little to me, I must admit that it paid off, as I ended up buying five products when with the same money I could only have bought one or maybe two in the Cuban informal market.

Note: The socks are not shown in the image because that was an additional purchase as I had money left over with these four products.

Those five products were a leather backpack that I wanted so badly to carry my HP notebook comfortably and stylishly anywhere, some comfortable sport sandals for the occasional outing, a pair of women's sandals that my mum loved, four pairs of socks that looked equally comfortable, and a pair of purple TWS Pro 6 wireless headphones for my sister. Here are the promotional images of those products as they appear on Shein.

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Obviously, as Shein - nor any other international online store that I know of - has shipments to Cuba, I had to make use of my sister's address who lives in the United States so that the products would arrive to her and then she would send them to me through a parcel service. Of course, as I had already said, I would also have to pay the price of the weighing, but in the end that money stayed in the family because we agreed that I would use it as if it were just another shipment that she sends when she can, that is, for the house. But if we do the mathematics and take into account that in the end the weighing came out at 3380 (at the price of how they take her USD when sending remittances), it still comes out much cheaper than buying all those things in Cuba, and even more, when they were paid with HBD.

The products arrived at her house after 10 days, and almost immediately she sent them here, which resulted in 13 more days of waiting, but in less than a month I had my Shein purchase at home. Here are the images of those products already in my hands:

I must say that I was very satisfied and reinforced, by far, that feeling of autonomy and economic independence that I acquired when I started to venture into the world of web3. On the other hand, none of this would have been possible, exactly, without Hive and all that it implies. I would also like to say that this will not be the last time I make a purchase like this, on the contrary, I now have new actions in mind. And the fact is that it has never been so easy to buy cheap things that, if there are any, are not the ones you want, and if there are the ones you want, in Cuba, are very expensive.

Créditos | Credits

Imágenes utilizadas | Images used

Todas las imágenes utilizadas son de mi propiedad. En el caso de la imagen de portada fue generada utilizando Copilot de Bing y editada en Canva, mientras que las imágenes promocionales de Shein contienen las fuentes en la parte inferior, y el resto, fueron tomadas con mi Redmi Note 11 | All images used are my own. The cover image was generated using Bing's Copilot and edited in Canva, while the Shein promotional images contain the fonts at the bottom, and the rest were taken with my Redmi Note 11.

• Imagen de portada editada en Canva | Cover image edited on Canva

Traducción | Translation

DeepL

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