Heads up - Importing stuff, extra charges from RM

craker

So I paid $33 for a HDMI card for my media PC. £18 for a socket seems a bit steep but its slightly specialist so I was stuck.

Extra payment due when collecting from the Post Office - £4 VAT (fair enough) and an £8 handling fee by Royal Mail. :evil:

Apparently 'there's a crackdown on imports' according to the bloke in the Post Office - this could be BS. One useful tip he gave me was having it addressed to Mr and Mrs Craker as that doubles the VAT free allowance.

Anyway, beware when buying from outside the EU.

daviesee

craker wrote:

So I paid $33 for a HDMI card for my media PC. £18 for a socket seems a bit steep but its slightly specialist so I was stuck.

Extra payment due when collecting from the Post Office - £4 VAT (fair enough) and an £8 handling fee by Royal Mail. :evil:

Apparently 'there's a crackdown on imports' according to the bloke in the Post Office - this could be BS. One useful tip he gave me was having it addressed to Mrs and Mrs Craker as that doubles the VAT free allowance.

Anyway, beware when buying from outside the EU.

Is that positive discrimination?

craker

I feel compelled to edit the original post.

nicklouse

so nothing extra they are just doing what they should be doing.

RDW

£18 used to be the threshold for charging VAT on imports. I didn't know they'd changed it, but a bit of Googling found this:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/11/section/77
http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPort ... OD1_031239

Reducing the threshold to £15 was clearly a much more pressing issue for our elected representatives that, e.g., closing the huge tax loopholes exploited by Amazon and Starbucks...