[Gareth]

I am absolutely fuming on this one this evening.

I bought a pair of cars from the bay on the 18th April. They cost me $23.77 or £14.72 according to the site. The postage was $9.

A month of waiting (and today I mailed the guy asking where the cars were) later, I come home to find I owe a Customs Charge of £13.97 which can only relate to these cars as I'm not waiting on anything else.

From the below I can only assume that £8 of that is Royal Mail which leaves £5.97 Customs fee. HOWEVER, acocrding to Andy's link the conversion rate of US Dollars to Sterling for April was 1.6246 which means that my $23.77 works out at £14.63.

So I can only presume that the seller must have put a higher value on the cars when he posted them than what I paid.

Well I am going to pay it tomorrow, get a receipt and then I am going to complain and keep on complaining until I'm jailed, fined or given my £13.97 back so I can buy another couple of cars.

 

[Gareth]

Don't know is the honest answer! I didn't even know about these charges until a few months ago and I've been darn careful to keep my US purchases below the £18 limit since. I can only presume that your US seller didn't put the value on the package which is a risky business in case it does get lost.

I'd go with lucky or you missed a meeting!*

*Little Bill Hicks reference there for you fellow fans!

 

[Gareth]

Thanks Slot32, that proves that these mistakes can happen. I wonder how much they thought these cars were worth to charge me £6? We shall see in a few hours time when I get to the Post Office!

 

[Gareth]

That is intriguing Diesel. The question is then: if I paid less than £15 for the cars and the seller wrote a higher value on the shipping, which is the price that should be used when calculating if I pay Import VAT or not? Because in my mind, the cars are worth what I paid for them. That is their value as it is the amount of money I handed over. So I should not have to pay the charges.

I'm definitely claiming.

Wraith: If I could buy all of my cars over here I probably would but HO has such a tiny footprint over here in terms of distribution that we don't really have a choice if we want the full range of what is out there.

 

[Gareth]

I asked the seller and for reasons known only to himself he told me that the cars were worth far more than I paid for them (go figure!) and that he therefore put an arbitrary amount in the region of $30 - $50. He can't remember exactly how much!

He has offered to help me with the fees so I may as well ask him for a contribution to the post office fees as I won't see that again.

 

[Gareth]

Well that's what I said. What you pay is how much it is worth. If someone else felt it was worth more, I would have been outbid.

I've just looked and his signed declaration is that the cars are worth $49. Idiot.