Post office fee

moneybags1957

I recently bought something from a website abroad which was posted to England. Now I fully expected there to be duty/tax on the item as it came from outside the E.U which was eight pounds, what I did not expect was the further eight pound fee the Post Office levied to collect the duty. In future is there any way to prepay the duty thus avoiding the Post Office fee?

LilElvis

moneybags1957 wrote: »

I recently bought something from a website abroad which was posted to England. Now I fully expected there to be duty/tax on the item as it came from outside the E.U which was eight pounds, what I did not expect was the further eight pound fee the Post Office levied to collect the duty. In future is there any way to prepay the duty thus avoiding the Post Office fee?

Do a search on this board. There are several (lengthy) threads on this topic, the basic upshot of which seems to be that yes, you can "avoid" the fee but it does seem to be a total faff for the small cost saving.

Fosterdog

Are you sure it was the post office who added a fee and not Royal Mail who would have been the courier company?

You could have avoided the fee by getting the sender to declare that the importer (you) would be handling the customs clearance and then you would have had to deal with all of the paperwork and charges once it was in the country. It really is a bit of a faff to sort yourself and £8 is pretty cheap considering.

LilElvis

.... And someone has just bumped one of the "post office handling fee scam" threads back onto page 1. Enjoy reading all 35 pages.

kwikbreaks

Some eBay sellers offer prepaid import tax which avoids that fee but there is probably another concealed in the charges.

A lot of the time you get away with any import taxes - I bought a leather jacket supposedly from the UK but it arrived (quickly) from Pakistan and they'd declared it as worth £10. It was quite a good jacket and well worth the £70 (iirc) that I'd paid for it.

Often stuff gets marked as a gift too but I generally avoid non-EU purchases of over £18 as I've been caught with charges a couple of times.

teddysmum

Some years ago two internet forum friends, who both lived in Middlesex, each ordered a throw,featuring dog portraits, from the same US seller. One got a large bill with the parcel and the other had nothing extra to pay.

moneybags1957

Fee was from Royal Mail ( I'm old and call it The Post Office).
Eight pounds Seems a lot to collect the duty seeing as I did the work by paying online, cannot imagine it cost eight pounds to process.
Never mind you live and learn,a lot worse things are happening in the world.

marliepanda

moneybags1957 wrote: »

Fee was from Royal Mail ( I'm old and call it The Post Office).
Eight pounds Seems a lot to collect the duty seeing as I did the work by paying online, cannot imagine it cost eight pounds to process.
Never mind you live and learn,a lot worse things are happening in the world.

RM and the post office are separate things.

They pay it for you, process the paperwork, and then you pay them back. You're not really 'doing the work'

But you are free to drive down to the clearance depot and do it yourself if you can do that for less than £8.

agrinnall

moneybags1957 wrote: »

...cannot imagine it cost eight pounds to process.

Sounds like there's a business opportunity for you then, if you're so sure that you're able to clear every imported item for less than £8 each.

sheramber

moneybags1957 wrote: »

Fee was from Royal Mail ( I'm old and call it The Post Office).
Eight pounds Seems a lot to collect the duty seeing as I did the work by paying online, cannot imagine it cost eight pounds to process.
Never mind you live and learn,a lot worse things are happening in the world.

Royal mail deal with customs on your behalf.