Page 1 of DDDhouse - beware of customs.

Just received 3 DVDs from them. Well, I say received, I had to go to the post office to collect them and pay £12 in customs charges!
The total value of the DVDs was only £22, and DDDhouse had marked price as $18, but I spoke to customs, adn they said Far East retailers often undervalue DVDs on the front, and that customs estimate the value - they valued this lot at £40!
Something to think of when ordering from these guys. It makes them alot more expensive!

I share ur grief :(
Does this mean DDD House has been black-listed ?
Refer to my posting in -
http://www.dvd.reviewer.co.uk/forums/thread.asp?Forum=222&Thread=79306&Type=1

This item was edited on Thursday, 14th February 2002, 17:56

I too feel your pain, but I don`t think this is really DDDHouse`s fault, just UK Customs doing their usual thing. I don`t think it`s partciularly because it`s from Hong Kong, either. If it`s any consolation, I stopped using Amazon.com because every package from them seemed to be stopped by Customs and a hefty duty imposed on it (what really sticks in the throat is the fact that you`re then charged even more because *they* had to open and re-seal the package). So far, I`ve had two packages from DDDHouse, and both of them arrived unopened by customs.

You can request that DDD House mark the package as "Gift" (ie your limit increases to £36) in the "Notes" part of the order form and they will oblige.

However, I share the above concern that DDD House may have been blacklisted, sadly.

how much did you actually pay for these dvds? I doubt 3 HK discs cost £40
Perhaps u could show them an invoice or something. My cd wow order of moulin rouge and monty python grail SE was held by customs recently even though they were sent seperately from hong kong and had a value of £14.99 each. Eventually they let them go and i got my discs today with no charges. They are being very unreasonable w*nkers at the moment in my opinion.They were actually shipped on the 1st Feb so thats 2 weeks they bloody held them and to what purpose?
rrrG[at]smotsuC

Before we knew anything about customs charges and all that, my brother ordered some WWF t-shirts and a book from the US online WWF shop. It was "Free shipping month" which is what convinced him, but the stuff arrived at the door via UPS, who charged him $10 for "brokerage charges" and another $40 for customs / miscellaneous.

Nasty surprise that, although the time before he got no such charges, even though it was worth about twice as much.

I`ve got a couple of Play packages that were open on arrival, but no customs charges yet.

And I have to admit I bought about 10 DVDs in America that easily went over the £140 importing limit, but didn`t have any extra duties to pay.

If you get caught by customs I do remember one person on a forum saying that they complained to Customs and they refunded them some of the charges when they sent them the invoice with the true value of the DVDs on it.

Yeah, they said they`ll do this but to be honest it will only be a few quid, and I don`t think I can be arsed!
The £3.95 handling charge won`t be refunded!

The reason for the delay in receiving stuff stopped by Customs is often that Customs play the discs to make sure they are what they claim to be. A common way of smuggling porn into the country is to put the disc in a box for an entirely innocuous film, sometimes using the packaging of an innocent dealer who has nothing at all to do with the activity.