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Im posting this here as I know we all import things regularly and hope that some of you guys know more that the HM Customs website where I cant find an answer.

I have recently bought a poster from We Buy Your Kids from Australia, cost $50au in total.

It has arrived but I need to pay £20 customs charge.

Does anyone know if this would be right? and if not then how do you go about telling someone its not right?

£20 seems high for an item of so little value!

Hi @phil - see Si's extensive post/s in the Shaun of the Dead thread - might help...

£8 of that is a handling fee Phil. So £12 is the VAT on a $50 item.....you are charged over £16 value in the UK. Im not doing the maths/conversion here, but that does seem like it's a bit high. Might be worth ringing the number on the custom sticker.

My Shaun of the Dead LP was marked by Mondo at $25.00, and I was charged £3.50 VAT plus £8 handling fee (the killer factor...)

So an additional £11 for an LP that cost (with rough conversion) around £14?

I'll be ringing them myself to find out why I was charged on this.

@Disco youre right on that £8 fee!!

just shocked as this is the first time i've ever had a custom charge, even when I bought JP and The Visitor which cost $98 in total. Maybe I have been lucky?

It's random... Sometimes your package gets checked, sometimes not.

Ten years ago one out of three of packages I received got stopped by customs here in Belgium.
Now looks like my government needs money and almost every package gets halted.
They got smart too...they know to look for packages marked Amazon etc.

Even if there is no value marked, they got these crazy charts on which they calculate the import duty + handling fee.
There is no method to the madness here...they just plain screw you. If you ask how it's calculated they can't or won't even answer you.

It's not only the fee that sucks, but it adds like ten days or more to the delivery, sometimes it just sits at customs for a week. Then they send you a letter or come by your house and you need the exact cash amount or you can drag your ass to the postal office two days later.

The only thing that helps is that the sender marks a very low amount on the package + GIFT.
But even then...

Yeah.....some people/companies will just flat out refuse to "gift" purchases. I can imagine the reasons why.

Did worry that Mondo had been hit with some kind of warning, but from other comments by people who've had contact with them, the recent spate of items with high-dollar declaration on their customs sticker was an error, and they plan to continue marking low value on future overseas items. Crap, I sure hope so!

Are one of the mods able to move Si's posts into this thread?

Rather than move it, here is a copy+paste from @Si's post.

Too bad no one here is a government lackey that can shed some light
Hello!

I’m not a Government thing but I work in airfreight and this is sort of what I do for a living, but on a much bigger industrial scale. Now follows a very lengthy goings-on…

Technically, EVERY commercial shipment that enters a country (UK here, but it’s little different anywhere else) should be subject to import duty and tax. Because that’s a massive pain in the arse, there are permissable levels of value under which these things don’t apply. And with the mail service, they handle so many packages per day and the number of staff is being constantly whittled away, it’s still a massive pain in the arse, so very few packages get properly scrutinised. Well, that used to be the case.

Especially since the (former) Royal Mail got privatised, this sort of thing is getting looked at more as it’s a rather profitable venture, but it’s still the cheapest alternative even if you lose out.
The ceiling for avoiding duties and taxes altogether has lowered recently, from £20 down to £15 – almost certainly to nab more DVD imports than anything else. H.M. Revenue and Customs are quite an accommodating bunch however and are pretty reasonable with their excise duty fees…

+ If a parcel is declared (and I’ll come to this bit in a minute) at a value over £15 but less than £135, then VAT is applied at 20%, but no import duty is collected.
+ If a parcel is declared as being over £135 but the total import duty amount payable is less than £9, then the duty amount is waived. 20% VAT still applies.
+ If a parcel comes in at over £135 and the duty amount comes to over £9, then you have to pay the duty amount, plus VAT charged at 20% of the declared value plus the duty amount.

Not sure what the current duty rate is for vinyl records – I’m back in work on Sunday so can look it up if none of the labels here who import US stuff into the EU pipe up with this in the meantime, it’s done as a % of the declared CIF (Carriage, Insurance and Freight) value of the goods which factors in the flat unit cost, any other shipper’s charges such as packing, plus the postage.

How to get round it? Well, it’s still a bit of a lottery but there are ways and means… The shipper can underdeclare the value of the goods on the CN22 (little customs label) to under whatever amount – LITA sent me 2 Mark Lanegan Anthology sets in a massive box and said it was worth $5. BUT this isn’t surefire: one thing that can get overlooked when filling the bloody things out is that if they don’t clearly state the currency the value is declared at, then the people at the other end are to assume that it’s in the currency at destination. Something valued at $18 and the $ gets missed becomes £18 over here, so a thing that is under the threshold when it leaves goes over the threshold when it gets here.
Also, if the person inspecting said package sees the declared low value and suspects shenanigans, they can open the package to see if there’s an invoice in there. And if there is, they can/will use that value instead.
So – ask your vendor if they can show x amount on the CN22 and leave the invoice out of the box. They are well within their rights to say no, but most will bend a little if they don’t do so as policy anyway. Ask them to declare it as a gift – this is pretty crucial as the tax-free threshold rises (for the UK, it goes from £15 to £36), this is the easiest way all-round and the shipper doesn’t risk an almighty (albeit fairly unlikely) bollocking for misdeclaration
Avoid Amazon internationally because, well, Amazon, but also because they will always declare the full amount of whatever without exception.

And so, for the benefit of anyone still reading this drivel, the small matter of the Royal Mail Processing Fee.
It used to be £2, then went up to £4, now it’s £8. And although I’ve fallen foul of this a fair few times, I’m going to defend it.
they’re not just thrown on a pile and then delivered. Anything that gets picked up for charges (Vinyl LPs will get done more often than others because they’re big boxes) has to be properly declared to Customs, and someone has to sit there and do it. It’s not the hardest job in the world (which is why they let me do it), but there’s still a whole bunch of stuff to be done and it all gets weird in terms of quotas, competition and suchlike so the poor schmo at the keyboard has to put in where it’s come from, what it is and what it’s worth. Sounds simple, but the “what it is” bit is a pain in the balls as everything that can possibly move and be sold anywhere will have an HS code which is an 11-digit horror (852410 is the chapter heading for gramophone records with the last 5 digits being further subdivisions I can’t believe I’m doing this shit on a Friday night I’m just glad there’s wine here with me). This has to be done for every single declared package over the threshold for VAT and above. And as the processing fee goes in as profit, this will probably increase again soon.

Yadda yadda etc. £8 is cheap. If you bring stuff in by courier (DHL etc), you will get hit for these charges pretty much 100% of the time as they declare everything to customs whether it’s low value or not (their shipping charges will usually go over the threshold anyway), and they go from £15 – £20+ a time. Commercial Freight Forwarders (Hi there!) will charge £35+ 100% of the time and make up another load of charges sometimes depending on how nice you are to us on the phone. The Royal Mail, USPS etc are a massive bunch of wankers from the person who throws your valuable stuff in the back of his van to the dick who leaves rubber bands in your garden and hides your mail in the bin, but for what they do (compared to what everyone else does it for) is nothing short of majestic. Sadly, they’re realising this and are working their way up to everyone else’s price structure rather than vice versa, but that’s commerce.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play outside.

That is indeed a very informed explanation!

Si Mentions Amazon international. Does anyone in the UK have experience with importing with Amazon? I was thinking of buying 2 records from the US and they say the price you pay them includes all customs charges and P&P! is this true?

It looks like what has happened is that not only has the person doing the customs entry misread the currency on the CN22 (note to people and labels shipping abroad: this happens a LOT - please label your currency amounts with the 3-letter code!), they've also taken the postage charge into account - which they're entitled to do.

I forgot to check the current UK duty rate for vinyl (will remind myself for tomorrow), but you'll probably have ended up paying zero on that as the first 9 quid of the duty charge is waived.
So, 20% VAT on an incorrect £50 would be £10, with a flat processing fee of £8. the remaining £2 will be based on what the postage worked out as, or what Customs decide the postage probably was if it isn't specified. An estimated £10 is at the lower end of the estimate.

I'm not sure if you can argue the toss with anyone about this if the currency has been applied wrongly (even if it is clearly marked!) as VAT goes to the Treasury and good luck with that if you're not VAT-registered. Fairly sure there's a "sod off" clause on the silver postcard from the Royal Mail about getting your £8 back in any eventuality though.



Just looked at the Amazon thing, and it's weird to say the least. This is a link to what Amazon call an Import Fees Deposit, and sounds like the thing you describe. What it looks like is a thing where you pay what Amazon think you'll pay in destination charges, which is charged as a deposit. The only way that this can work is that if the goods are imported to an appointed third party somewhere in the EU en masse and then forwarded on. This is crap because
a) If Amazon do this in bulk, the duty amount payable in any one hit to them will be way over £9 so you'll have to pay your bit;
b) You'll wait a fair bit longer to get your goods; and my personal favourite
c) Amazon will take 20% VAT as part of this deposit, the cheeky bastards don't pay VAT in the UK at all (they pay 3% in Luxembourg instead, which is where the computer that takes your payment details is plugged in) and they'll keep this bit as extra profit.

" and my personal favourite
c) Amazon will take 20% VAT as part of this deposit, the cheeky bastards don’t pay VAT in the UK at all (they pay 3% in Luxembourg instead, which is where the computer that takes your payment details is plugged in) and they’ll keep this bit as extra profit."

That's a fucking liberty!

Well i picked up the parcel and paid the fee.

Turns out its exactly as you say, they have taken the total value including postage and then converted a clearly marked $AU dollars into Pound sterling and I can only assume this was so taxing (great pun eh!) on the customs officer that they had to add the £8 "handling fee"

I checked tracking on my shaun from mondo yesterday and it said it had been signed for and recieved on Saturday. Wtf? I didn't signing anything mofo! I saw the posty today and he handed me a slip with all the royal mail shit on it. I had to pay £11.11. Arsehats.

My Pet Sematary direct from Mondo arrived marked as $5, with no duties to pay.

So, since my Shaun/Dead was marked as $25 and I DID have to pay, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that's what the snafu was.

I really hope Mondo correct the intermittent customs labelling error for Int'l shipping, so we can all get ahead and not have to play the Customs Craps game......

@Si has been super great with giving the lowdown on this, but it does sound to me like there's no actual hard and fast logic to how the UK dept works at least - it's a lottery, they change the rules as they go, and like a lot of bureaucracy they simply don't appear to feel the need to explain themselves or correct mistakes etc.

@disco.. as an adjunct to this, recently ordered a couple of LP's from the USA via another label who majors on this board (will spare their blushes here) and asked whether the amount given on the front label could be marked down to avoid the possibility of these extra import charges. I was told flat out 'no, we can't do that'. So policy on this subject appears just as random!

@spun - I can well believe it's not something that companies are meant to do - I guess we should be grateful when they are amenable to the idea! It's fucking with the VAT man after all.......a giant brainless hairy ape with no manners and bad breath!!

It's a tricky one.
Any company is well within their rights to say "no" to requests to underdeclaring the value on the CN22, as it's them that'll get done if Customs at either end of the shipment decide that's what they've done - it can lead to all sorts of nastiness if they get caught out (fines, audits, bigger fines, worse at the far end of the spectrum) so it's understandable if any particular vendors don't want to play, especially if they've been on the end of a warning before.
It's a commercial decision though and more often than not most sellers who despatch via the mail will at least mark stuff as a gift* in order to keep the trade from people who will shop with sellers who will do so. And to be fair on Customs types, they are fairly sensitive to this otherwise they'd be doing this 100% as it's far easier (and would generate more cash) to go after lots of little tax avoidances from us lot - because this is what we're complicit in when we expect vendors to underdeclare - than a couple of big ones who can afford the sort of lawyers and accountants that we can only dream of Best bet when buying from abroad is to expect a charge of £12-20 quid, factor that into your decision to buy and treat every time you don't get asked to pay as a bit of a bonus.
And I forgot to check that sodding duty rate again. To be honest, if it's any less than a million percent it's going to be a disappointment after this wait.




*This is a really ambiguous thing as far as Customs is concerned - a "gift" is supposed to be defined as something that is a gift from the shipper to the consignee so technically has no commercial value, but it can also be read as the consignee buying something intended as a gift for someone else. It's really something that is dependent on the mood of whoever checks your parcel on any given day.

Droppin' knowledge as ever, @Si. Nice one!

Glad to say that my recent Mondo purchases (2001 and PS) both were down as $5 Vinyls

looks like to c0ck up on SOTD was a genuine one off by them

got the variant of 2001 too :0)

3.5%! Unless you bring it in from somewhere weird.
Still, I like the official description, purely because the notion of sound/music being a "phenomena" is a rather beautiful one for a Civil Servant to have come up with.

Chapter 37 is all about photographic plates, exposed & developed film and the chemicals used in the process of doing so, if anyone was wondering.