Import duty-clearance charges

Just received a Fedex invoice for £61.16 for a spindle and vfd Chinese import, which didnt make my day :(

I've bought loads of stuff from China inc hiwin rails and vfd's etc and I cant remember paying that amount of duty or often any duty at all on these purchases.

Have I just been lucky or are the spindle and vfd packages in particular always subject to 20% duty?

ps
Just on another note the postman due to his diligance and professionalism has managed to get this invoice through my letterbox even though the name, the number, the street are all wrong. Only the postcode is correct. I'm wondering if its even valid as such?

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Originally Posted by marbles

Just received a Fedex invoice for £61.16 for a spindle and vfd Chinese import, which didnt make my day :(

I've bought loads of stuff from China inc hiwin rails and vfd's etc and I cant remember paying that amount of duty or often any duty at all on these purchases.

Have I just been lucky or are the spindle and vfd packages in particular always subject to 20% duty?

ps
Just on another note the postman due to his diligance and professionalism has managed to get this invoice through my letterbox even though the name, the number, the street are all wrong. Only the postcode is correct. I'm wondering if its even valid as such?

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I buy quite a lot of parts for making fishing lures from the states and normally get stung for import VAT plus Royal Mail handling charge. I keep the total value (which I believe includes postage) below £135 as over this import duty is added on as well. I sometimes don't get charged but as a rule I do. The charges also can also vary depending where the item is sent from and what it is. You have probably been lucky in the past but I expect these days HMRC will be looking for every penny they can get.

As to your question if it is valid I think if you don't pay within the timescale they just send it back.

I bought some stuff from China on AliExpress that was about £7. HMRC assessed it as worth £28 and charged VAT and Royal Mail added a further £7.50 forwarding fee. I was required to pay all fees to RM before RM would deliver. I enquired what would happen if the money was not paid and they said it would be returned to sender in 28 days. So that was what happened. I got a refund on the original order.

I then reordered and it came straight through. (It was electrical sockets which were unshuttered with flimsy contacts, so unsafe and I did not use them in the end).

If you've not had to pay, then you've just gotten lucky.

Legally you should be paying VAT on any order over the value of £15, and import duty over £135. Not doing so knowingly is tax evasion.


Customs go through periods of clamping down, as it's well known china likes to under declare the value of goods.
If they suspect the value has been declared wrong, they will value the item at market value with VAT/tax accordingly, and if you want to appeal it, the onus is on you to prove they've valued it wrong.


Personally, I've got no issue paying VAT and import duty, but the courier fees are often a piss take. I paid a DHL invoice last night, which had to be paid before they will even deliver the item. IIRC the handling charge was about £25, then there was some kind of loss risk charge of £11 something, which was listed to cover their risk of people not paying for items after they'd been delivered. And yes, by prepaying, I still had to pay that fee. About half the total customs bill was for DHLs fees.

Another thing to watch out for is if the seller doesn't provide a proper invoice INCLUDING THE SHIPPING in the shipping documentation. I had this last year on a spindle, and someone in customs calculated the VAT on what they thought the shipping ought to have been according to some random formula, rather than what it actually was. This resulted in me being charged something like £75 extra. Thankfully I'm VAT registered, so I promptly claimed it back, but it could have been expensive.

Yeah, OP's been lucky up until now. I think my worse example was buying some linear rail and carriages from... singapore, I think, cost was something like £80, customs/duty/handling charge added about half as much again.

There again, I think the sellers of a recent servo declared the value around £80... I'm sure I paid more... and that attracted pretty much the minimum of £25 from DHL. Delivery driver said it was £25.90, and anything more than £25 he wasn't supposed to handover until the duty was paid, and would I promise to pay immediately if he left the motor with me. Fair deal, I reckon.