Border trade

Common items involved in border trade include alcohol, tobacco, medication, recreational drugs, automobiles, automotive fuel, groceries, furniture and clothing.

Similarly, there is an important number of French purchasers buying tobacco and alcohol in Spanish border towns such as Le Perthus.

During summer, around 70,000 visitors cross the Spanish border daily to buy such products, occasioning severe traffic jams.

[3] There is a significant amount of border trade in marijuana between the Netherlands, where cannabis is essentially legal, and surrounding countries such as Belgium, Germany, and France.

[4] A more legal example of the Netherlands is the Limburg province, where citizens occasionally take trips to Germany and Belgium to buy commodities like: medicinal products, handcrafted furniture, fresh produce, alcoholic beverages or home appliances for lower prices due to the VAT.

[12] Consumers take part in cross-border trading to broaden their product selection, gain access to a larger market place, or take advantage of currency volatility.

Dedicated cross-border shopping solutions such as Canada Post's Borderfree program existed to mitigate these problems with varied success.

The consumer import of prescription drugs from Canada and Mexico into the United States can provide a large cost savings for the patient, and is sometimes even facilitated by insurance companies, and the quality of medicine in Canada is comparable to that in the United States During the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, the US–Canada and US–Mexico borders were closed to non-essential traffic, leaving merchants who normally catered to cross-border shoppers stranded with no access to their customers.

In other cases, residents may cross boundaries to take advantage of more friendly legislation regarding restricted products, such as alcohol, tobacco, fireworks, firearms, gambling, etc.

[22] Likewise, despite the ruggedness of the relief when having to cross the Andes mountain range along the Argentinean-Chilean border, there is a high flow of trans-Andean buyers, being a notable case that of Chileans near the city of Mendoza.