Avoiding customs
 

Is there a legal way to avoid being stuck with a customs bill when ordering from overseas. The difference of one pound in the price of a set adds nearly a tenner overall!

I find hiding the DVDs up my tradesman's entrance when going through customs helps avoid any extra tax, of course I can only get a few into the country this way.


Otherwise buy your good through a reseller or have the items marked as a gift.

The only thing you can do is ask the seller to mark the value as something like $22 regardless of the actual cost, obviously this only works on 'some' ebay sellers, and the customs & excise website says you are liable if it's found that the value has been misrepresented.


The other option is write to your MP, lol.

I just ended up paying out £30 to the post office in the last few weeks. Trying to buy the rest of the BCI Spanish horror titles before they go OOP.

I usually buy R1 discs via http://www.axelmusic.com/ - since they are based in Denmark, packages they send can avoid customs. The costs are slightly higher than buying direct, but at least you know exactly how much it is going to cost and don't have to lumber down the post office to get your DVDs.

Tony at xploited cinema was the man for this.You sent him a message saying 'No customs charges please Tony' and he'd stick a value of ten Dollars on 4 dvds worth eighty dollars.....:rofl:

Ah yes, all those "commercial samples" he used to send out. Wonderful.

Pity he wasn't able to sell the business on, its closing will leave a big gap in the cult cinema world.

<bumpity bump of a very old thread>


I was just thinking about the old customs charges issue after a recent purchase and was wondering what experience you all have with this. I rarely order from sites where this would be a problem but was wondering if out of those of you who do how often you've been stung with these charges? Is there anything that makes a package more susceptible to incurring these or is it just down to bad luck?

One thing I know that doesn't work at least when ordering from Amazon - whether they have changed the rules, or if it was only an old wives tail in the first place - is marking parcels as 'gift'. I bought three digibook BDs last year and got stung for £18 even though I sent them to my parents' address as 'gifts'. In effect it would have cost the same to just have bought them from Amazon UK Marketplace. :mmph: To be honest, I don't mind paying the VAT as even taking that into consideration you can often save a quite a bit on buying the same through UK importers or ebay, it's just the massive 'handling fees' that RM charge you. On the rare occasions that I have been charged customs, RM's fees are usually 3-4 times what the VAT charge was. :censored:

It used to be a lot of luck, imported a lot of sets like the BU Mondo Cane set which cost about £60 new and did not get stung, but then a couple of years back they became more effective and everything coming through was getting stopped if it was over the limit.

For the more expensive US releases (or a big order) I just use Axel,for HK releases I have another favourite but I guess not many people order those? ;)

Axel recently lowered their shipping/handling charges again btw.