Page 1 of Anybody challenged a customs charge and won?!?

I`ve had a note through the door informing me of a customs charge (£5.65) for a couple of DVDs from amazon.com

Thing is I ordered the DVDs with a $15 discount coupon and when converted to UK money the total price I paid was £17.40. As this is under the £18 worth of goods you are allowed to bring in before being charged VAT and duty I wondered if it is worth my while challenging the charge.

I`m thinking this might be a long and boring battle for such a little amount so might not bother, but if anyone else has been in a similar situation and got their money back with minimal time/fuss it might be worth me complaining. Anyone got any similar stories?

No similar stories here I`m afraid, but you could just refuse to pay it and send a letter to whoever is charging you the £5.65 explaining its under the £18 limit for personal importations.

Keep us informed. ;-)

I may not have much joy pursuing customs for a refund as Amazon had labelled the box using the normal price as the goods` value - not the price I actually paid. Even the invoice inside the box had the normal price and didn`t mention the actual amount I shelled out. Most annoying.

I`m going to e-mail Amazon and see if there is anything they are prepared to do about it.

for some strange reason, I never one got charge once from the post office throughtout all my purchased from amazon.com, I have made over 15 purchases, most of the time 2 DVDs at once.

Even when I order T2, saving Private Ryan, Sex & the city and 3 other DVDs together which came to over $150, they didn`t ask for any tax duties,

however when I use the 3-5 days delivery from amazon.com, they sent it through UPS (DHL dpes not charge you anything), they charged me £21.50 !!! I was shocked! but I had to pay it because the guy had the package in his hand, it turns out that not onlly tax they charge but also something call "brokage surcharge" so I wrote back to amazon.com and complainted (email written by a friend who is in law school) and got my shipping cost back, which turned out to be about £12, not all the cost but at least some of it,

So I suggest you write to them and compliant through the roof, they are usually really good, but the most they can do is to give to your shipping cost back, no more.

The Amazon.com import duty costs are a bit up and down depending on which shipping service you use, and also where the package is sent from/to!

When using the express UPS service, UPS calculate and pay the duty for you, you then have to pay them the money on delivery. However, if you use the worldmail option (I always do now), most packages I`ve received are sent from Seattle to AMSTERDAM (check the box, there`s a small white sticker on it) , and then onto the UK. There is no import duty between Holland and the UK as we`re EU countries, so you never pay duty using this method. I have made 20 to 30 orders of between 2 and 6 DVD`s in this way, and have only paid duty ONCE on my recent Toy Story order which was sent from Campbellville, Kentucky DIRECTLY to the UK! The post office asked me for £8 (boo!), but this is the first one, so I can`t complain really.

Lets hope stuff in the future goes back to Amsterdam! As for why we don`t pay the Dutch authorities import duty....either their import allowance is higher than the measly £18 or so we get, or they can`t be bothered to chase across Europe trying to reclaim the duty.

The worldmail option on average takes just over a week to me here in London, so its not as bad as the 7 to 26 working days listed on the Amazon website.

Fair play to Amazon - after a couple of e-mails they have given me $10 worth of coupons.

They do seem to have good customer service, even if they do occasionally try and screw you with price experiments. ;-)