A couple of weeks ago I ordered a couple of t-shirts from Cafepress.
This morning, I had a card from the postman to say that I owed £7 in customs charges, and please could I come to the delivery office to pay for my goods.
It turned out that my 2 t-shirts had just tipped the £18 limit for commercial goods on import (something like $37 in value), and were thus liable for a charge. Annoying… I should have done them on separate orders.
However – and this is the interesting part – standing in the queue at the delivery office, I saw a notice stating that from April 2, any packages that do incur customs charges will also incur an additional £8 handling charge from the Royal Mail. Not content with introducing a bizarre size-based charging system for posting out of the country, we’ll now be paying an additional tax to receive our goods into the country. If I’d been picking up my items in 10 days’ time, I would have had to effectively double the overall cost of the t-shirts.
Just be careful what you order; I’ll be keeping an eye on that from now on.
On the plus side, now that I’ve got the t-shirt, I’m ready to represent eightbar at an internal talk on Tuesday… 🙂
Posted whilst at White Leaf House [ plazes.com ]
Technorati Tags: customs, import, import duty, post, cafepress, Royal Mail, tax
