Great 'Buy now from the US' Hunt.

EdinburghKev

I have ordered a few golf items from http://www.3balls.com and they are fantastic. Both items arrived within a week UPS delivery and cost about a quarter of the cost if bought in the UK. A PING driver I bought was £400 in the UK and under £80 with delivery from 3balls. This club arrived in a matter of days.

greynomad

Dear Martin

I have been caught out a couple of times buying electronics in the USA. There are two problems.

1 British Customs and Excise will levy duty unpredictably and erratically. That is, they will charge some items and not others. You do not know how much they will charge. There is also a handling fee for the "service". It gets worse, if you decide to return something and you ship it back to your US supplier it is very difficult if not impossible to recover the amount of duty paid. They demand copies of all original documents including their own duty notices which are usually stuck to the outside of a package and hence thrown away. They are not helpful to deal with.

2 It is more difficult to get reasonable consumer service from the USA. Think of a British call centre in Asia, multiply that by two - someone who really does not understand English, is on duty only for the time you are talking to them and does not care two pins whether you live or die as a customer. Be very careful to choose reputable suppliers. I would also recomend PayPal as a form of payment as they will help in the case of certain disputes.

Rainman6364

Not sure how relevant etc but what the heck.

My wife is using chinese herbal medicine (so tempted to use inverted commas) that she was paying £8 a bottle for from her accupuncturist. Looking at UK sites I could find it for about £6 but buying in bulk from:-

http://store.orientalpharmacy.com/

it worked out at less than £2 per bottle including delivery and it got here in 7 days.

lesley_rod

yenners wrote:

for any ladies who use bare escentuals make up - it is SOOooo much cheaper in the states. just check out the sephora website:

https://www.sephora.com (US site)

also worth buying - any american make up brand - kiehls, estee lauder, clinique - products can be as low as almost half price

Yenners, not sure if I'm doing something wrong but the shipping details on https://www.sephora.com (US) say ..
Can I ship outside the United States?
Sephora.com ships to all 50 U.S. states and to Canada as well. Shipping to other international destinations and U.S territories (such as Puerto Rico and Guam) is unavailable at this time. Also Sephora.com does not ship to APO/AP addresses.

How do you manage to order from them?

lesley_rod

Art_2

lesley_rod wrote:

Yenners, not sure if I'm doing something wrong but the shipping details on www.sephora.com (US) say ..
Can I ship outside the United States?
Sephora.com ships to all 50 U.S. states and to Canada as well. Shipping to other international destinations and U.S territories (such as Puerto Rico and Guam) is unavailable at this time. Also Sephora.com does not ship to APO/AP addresses.

How do you manage to order from them?

lesley_rod

Send them an email and ask them if they will ship to you here in the UK.

Regards,
Art.

boglin

We've just returned from the US and Canada (last Thursday but luckily we arrived just before the airport was closed!)

Clothes and shoes are definitely a great buy and at the moment there are many sales on. We have visited Woodbury Common (mentioned earlier in this thread) - this is an amazing and HUGE outlet - but there are many other smaller outlets all offering bargains. Look out for leaflets in tourist info places, hotels or otherwise, which give details and also a voucher to exchange for a coupon book at certain outlets. Sometimes it is worth just asking for the coupon book at the outlet info desk and they will give it to you. That saved us even more! Haggar - a men's retailer - was selling some great reversible polo shirts for just $7 each and offered a further discount if you spent over $75.

Even the smaller outlet malls usually have Levi outlets - we paid around $12.99 or less for jeans. Another great buy is Converse shoes and Croc sandals - they are selling in dollars what they would cost in pounds in UK - and they seem to have more styles and colours on offer as well.

In Canada you can collect all your receipts (including short-term accomodation but not food). If you have paid over $50 before tax (if applicable) per transaction and at least $200 in total, you can claim a refund of one of the types of tax - either by sending the receipts in a pre-addressed envelope available from many tourist places (you can have the refund paid to your credit card) or you can claim it back in person, in cash, at one of several border crossings to the US. So you get about 5% refunded.

I don't know if you can do this in the US or not - I would have thought that you could - maybe even at the airport; it is just a question of having enough time set aside as you leave the country to make the claim.

ac24

Im going to the US next week. Were going to buy loads of stuff (clothes, electricals goods etc).

What would happen when we bring this stuff back with us through the airport? Would we have to pay any fees?

Art_2

ac24 wrote:

Im going to the US next week. Were going to buy loads of stuff (clothes, electricals goods etc).

What would happen when we bring this stuff back with us through the airport? Would we have to pay any fees?

You are allowed to bring back about £140 worth of goods plus the limit of cigarettes, drink and perfume laid down in the rules. Any goods over £140 will be subject to VAT and/or import duty.

Regards,
Art.

ac24

how would they know the price of each item, and does this mean that any stuff you have originally could be asumed to be bought from usa?

is there anyway you can do something which may avoid this? like take labels of clothes? seems quite an odd system

Art_2

ac24 wrote:

how would they know the price of each item, and does this mean that any stuff you have originally could be asumed to be bought from usa?

is there anyway you can do something which may avoid this? like take labels of clothes? seems quite an odd system

Firstly, you are required to produce receipts for any goods you bought, otherwise Customs will put their valuation on them.

Yes you can make items look used to try and avoid Customs.

In practice you are not likely to get stopped so long as you haven't been stupid in the amount you have purchased. They are not interested in holidaymakers returning with a few CDs or a few pairs of trainers.

Customs officers generally look for certain types of person or anyone acting suspiciously. They also pay more attention to certain flights dependant on where they have come from. If you are returning from the US a Miami flight might get more attention than one from say, Houston.

Regards,
Art.