How has your dealing with Customs been?

[bust3dstr8]

After recieving my last large order it got me thinking........."Wow, I've been lucky with customs and they have never even charged me one cold cent."
From a huge Super Grafx w/ Super CD box to the single games they have let me slide.

I'm in Boston so most of my dealings are with JFK Customs. In three years of pretty heavy importing, I've had a problem once, where it took numerous calls and about three weeks for them to release my package.

I know other contries like Canada are more apt to charge their citizens duites/tarrifs, and some of the European countries are outright blood-thirsty.

I was curious about your Customs dealings.
Smooth Sailing.........or Tales of Doom?

[Wolf]

I find it is 50/50 with canada post/customs.

Most of my imports come from play asia or on ebay ( if pa is out of stock ), the value is declared on the package every time, canada customs charges 18% of the items cost ( they dont include shipping though ), there has been many times where I have had $60-80 usd valued items be slipped through my mail box, one time they just left it outside the door and then sometimes they knock and I have to pay duty or head to the post office aft 5 pm to pay it from the slip they leave.

Fed Ex and UPS I have had to pay duty 100% of the time.

My guess is it is just CP workers being lazy or very nice by leaving it.

Fuck I hate duty!

[anagrama]

I had never had a customs charge until the last month or so, when two seperate SG-1000 bundles from Japan cost me about £30 (~$60) each :( One was from eBay, the other from a YAJ proxy.

[smork]

When I lived in the US I never had a single issue with US Customs. I even ordered some Cuban cigars online once, they got there with a note inside saying "illegal to import", but yet they let me have them :) I've also brought piles of game and computer stuff and Customs just says "Have a nice day!" I think they are mostly looking for illegal/dangerous stuff and people shipping commercial quantities of stuff, not us personal importers.

Malaysia customs beats me up every time -- up to 500MYR (~$130ish) allowed before they hit you with either 20% or 30%, depending on if it's hardware or software. Yick.

[Adol]

We have TONS of packages in France coming with custom taxes...if you order from Play-Asia for example,or if your order is over 200$, about 75% chances ot be taxed.
20% VAT on products AND shipping

[Pilotwings]

Play Asia is the worst place to order something big or worth £23 pounds or more from as you will get hit with import tax everytime. I have never been hit by import tax from any ebay seller from the usa or asia/japan. It makes me think that play asia and import tax are a joint company lol. A word ov advice is get your games 1 at a time from P asia so you wont get hit.

[Hwj_Chim]

I order from play-asia all the time and I never had to deal with customs.

[lkermel]

I guess you may have to pay customs if you order a big load of stuff. I never paid custom for a couple of games, only for large boxes. They may assume you're a shop or something, and then tax you up.
Sale tax, at least in the US, can be tough to figure out. Buyers are supposed to pay their Sale Tax for every item they buy outside of the State they are living in. I was told you are even supposed to list them on your tax return and pay Sales Tax, which can add up to 10% of the overall value you spent that year... I'm not completely sure about this though, but I've heard about it many times.