Best source for French and Spanish stamps

[Liam73]

Hi folks,

Firstly I want to thank kimmylee for the assistance, ended up ordering my Royal Mail stamps but both my thread and account were either deleted or disappeared into the abyss shortly after.

I'm looking to acquire both French and Spanish stamps so I can send an SASE to football (soccer) players with 8x10 photos to be autographed and returned to me in Canada.

Luckily I speak French so it was fairly easy navigating La Poste's site to acquire French stamps, however in order to acquire 7,80 € in stamps it would cost me 24,00 € in shipping, which is a little more than I'm willing to pay.

Another option on their site is to print off your own stamps but it costs suspiciously less than buying actual stamps and I'm not entirely informed on how the French stamp system works (it took me a while to understand how Royal Mail's stamps worked as well).

I've been on the Spanish postal site as well (Correos) but I'm unable to distinguish if the stamps they sell are eligible for international shipments and how much they're worth.

Can anybody offer me advice as to what other options I have? I understand you're able to buy USPS stamps from sites such as Amazon but I'm unable to find French or Spanish stamps anywhere except their proprietary websites.

Any advice is appreciated.

EDIT: I've also been considering acquiring euros from my local bank and including them en lieu of stamps. Would this be a viable alternative?

[kimmylee]

Euros would be fine as an alternative

[Liam73]

kimmylee saves the day once again!

Euros it is. Of course stamps would probably be more convenient for the recipient but it's simply too much of a hassle (not to mention relatively expensive) to determine and acquire the correct stamps for certain foreign countries.

No idea why my account/last thread were deleted by the way. Perhaps I was asking a question that had already been answered 1000 times on the forum, which I did search for but couldn't find the specific details I was trying to find.

Thanks again kimmylee, your help is much appreciated.

[Sciencegeek]

You can buy Spanish stamps through the official website, but I think you need to register to know how much shipping costs you have to pay. I (I'm from Spain) have never bought them online because there are shipping costs even within the country, so I just buy them in person when I need a couple. I can explain how they work if you're interested or if you're still considering the possibility of using stamps instead of euros.

You can find them on Amazon/ebay sometimes, but the're usually much more expensive there (they're treated as collector's items) and not worth it if you only want them to use them and not to collect them. You also have to make sure that they're in euros and not in the old currency. I've heard that some euro countries still accept stamps of their old currencies provided that the converted amount is correct, but Spain doesn't.