I am mostly going to stop buying from non-EU retailers

[andrewducker]

I don't mind paying for shipping from the US. $15 isn't unreasonable for transporting things halfway around the world.

The exchange rate of $1.21 to the pound isn't entirely unreasonable.

22% in customs charges is a little high, but that's not really the retailer's fault.

It's the "brokerage charges" that really take the piss. Somehow UPS think it's ok to charge me an extra £11 for the cost of taking the customs charges off of me and passing them on to the government. Which, as it's all done near-automatically, is just ridiculous.

So from now on I'll be keeping an eye out for places that ship from inside Europe. Until we leave that. Then I'll be reduced to buying only things shipped from places I can walk to, I assume.

Comments

[rmc28]

The Royal Mail charge £8 by default, per package, plus a percentage of the value.

(Guess how annoyed I was to get an order from the USA, in 2 packages, both of which had labels stating the entire order value on the front.)

[j_v_lynch]

UPS does the same thing when shipping to Canada from the US. I've had charges that came to about the same cost as the item I ordered. I won't buy anything that ships UPS unless I have no other alternative.

[darkoshi]

That would deter me too.

I've had only a few orders from overseas to the U.S., but don't recall ever having to pay any customs or brokerage fee for them.

The last 2 items (within the last 2 years) I ordered from the U.K. ended up being cancelled by the sellers and refunded, so I don't know if there would have been any extra charge when receiving the item (it would have surprised me, as nothing about a customs fee was mentioned on the websites).

Before that, I had an order from HongKong with no fee (shipping was $31).