Page 1 of Customs duty

:(
If you are ordering a number of items be sure to order them seperately with a day or two in between. It is a pest I know but sendit.com have just put all of my order into two boxes and I have paid a whopping £32 duty between them, which I would not have paid if they had sent them seperately like other suppliers have done.

Ageing Hippy

Really?

I thought all the notable Jersey companies were customs friendly. Not that i use Sendit anymore.

This item was edited on Tuesday, 23rd November 2004, 21:15

Quote:
I thought all the notable Jersey companies were customs friendly.

Nope I found that out the hard way too when I got hit by customs from a DVD boxset sent by Play. :(

Best thing to do is just make each order a seperate one, that way they never combine them.

To be strictly accurate, never place a single order for 18 or more quid in total from places that might get hit by customs duty/VAT - this includes play.com and amazon.com for example. CD WOW claim to have avoided all duty no matter what the price of the order via some "clever" routing of the package (no, I don`t know how they do it and I guess CD WOW are keeping mum on this so other sites don`t work out how to do it).

Of course, the snag with this theory is that separate orders only works well when there`s free postage involved, otherwise you tend to find that the postage can work out more expensive for 2 separate orders (particularly from US sites, pretty well all of which seem to charge international postage to the UK).

Quote:
Nope I found that out the hard way too when I got hit by customs from a DVD boxset sent by Play.

Was that from Play.com (region 2) or PlayUSA.com (region 1)?

I thought Play pre-paid VAT and duty on their Region 2 stuff - at least, they always used to.

Mike

It was from Play.com, this was over a year ago now so maybe it has changed? The boxset was £19.99.

Just got stung by customs... GBP7.72 for Smallville S3 from DVDSoon. :(

Quote:
It was from Play.com, this was over a year ago now so maybe it has changed?

I think so. I`ve ordered a few £18+ items from them in the past year, and never once considered that they might get walloped by customs. They either pre-pay VAT or i suspect they may even have a mainland warehouse.

They also send out everything separately, so`s not to built up a parcel`s value.

Quote:
Just got stung by customs... GBP7.72 for Smallville S3 from DVDSoon.

On that note, i`d advise everyone looking to order season boxsets, muliti-disc sets, etc especially from overseas, to check these forums to see where you are safe from tax and duty if you`re unsure. DVDsoon are not in the `customs friendly` group of e-tailers, so you should expect to be bungholed on orders over £18 from them.

Sometimes it pays to shell out a wee bit extra up front to go with a customs safe seller.

Most of us found out the hard way too! >:(

Who are the "safe" etailers then? Please send me a PM so as to not attract unwanted attention. ;)

If they sent it as a gift there wouldnt be a problem. Ezy do, why not play... cdwow... dvdsoon etc..?

====================================

About now im having amnesia and deja vu. I think Ive forgotten this before :D

This item was edited on Thursday, 25th November 2004, 22:12