Royal Mail £8 Internal Post Handling Fee scam?

doveman

Hermione_Granger wrote: »

No, because it wasn't a question it was a statement.
If I was asking a question I might have typed something such as "did you mean to type English with a capital E?"

In which case, your English is pretty poor too.

"You're meant to type English with a capital E" would have made sense as a statement but "English is meant to be spelt with a capital E" would have been more correct.

"Surely you meant to type English with a capital E" makes no sense as a statement and suggests you presume to know what I intended to do, which you don't.

Xad

I received a card through the post today for an item i ordered from China (not collected item yet). The item cost just under £15, so i shouldn't have been charged anything, yet the card says i owe £11.01 (£8 being the Royal Mail charge), so for some reason i've been charged £3.01, guessing that's VAT as 20% of 15 is £3 and then they probably threw in a penny extra so that i'm in the bracket where i have to pay?

Any idea as to why i've be charged VAT since the item is under £15? I've printed out the receipts and bank charges to prove this, however, is there any point in discussing this with RoyalMail when i go to collect the item? I'm thinking i should pay and collect and deal with the refund request with HMRC? Not sure how that will go.

Really confused as to how they managed to charge me since the item is definitely under £15.

marliepanda

Price + postage is what they look at, so it will have cost more than £15 and is chargeable.

Xad

marliepanda wrote: »

Price + postage is what they look at, so it will have cost more than £15 and is chargeable.

Will they include postage even if i didn't pay extra for postage since it was free shipping?

custardy

Xad wrote: »

Will they include postage even if i didn't pay extra for postage since it was free shipping?

You are confusing your order with the real world.
The shipping wasnt free,you simply didnt pay a separate cost.
Nor do you know what is declared on the package.

Xad

custardy wrote: »

You are confusing your order with the real world.
The shipping wasnt free,you simply didnt pay a separate cost.
Nor do you know what is declared on the package.

I understand that the shipping wasn't actually free instead it's included in the price i paid for the item, hence the total i paid was under £15 - £14.78 to be exact. So would that mean HMRC would see it as a total of less than £15? Or do they simply add the postage amount visible on the parcel on top of the total item amount (even if the total item amount was partially the postage fee).

And yes, it's true i don't know the declared price and i'll only find out when i go to pick it up, just wanting to make sure if there's any point in presenting the printouts of the total i paid for the item to the RoyalMail employee or whether that would be pointless.


Just a little strange that 1 pence is what caused the £11.01 import VAT charge. I'm guessing it's more to do with a possible bad label, which caused customs to open the package and guess a VAT was applicable hence declared the price themselves as £15.01.

custardy

Xad wrote: »

I understand that the shipping wasn't actually free instead it's included in the price i paid for the item, hence the total i paid was under £15 - £14.72 to be exact. So would that mean HMRC would see it as a total of less than £15? Or do they simply add the postage amount visible on the parcel on top of the total item amount (even if the total item amount was partially the postage fee).

And yes, it's true i don't know the declared price and i'll only find out when i go to pick it up, just wanting to make sure if there's any point in presenting the printouts of the total i paid for the item to the RoyalMail employee or whether that would be pointless.


Just a little strange that 1 pence is what caused the £11.01 import VAT charge. I'm guessing it's more to do with a possible bad label, which caused customs to open the package and guess a VAT was applicable hence declared the price themselves as £15.01.

No point. your issue is with HMRC

sk00bie1

Xad wrote: »

I received a card through the post today for an item i ordered from China (not collected item yet). The item cost just under £15, so i shouldn't have been charged anything, yet the card says i owe £11.01 (£8 being the Royal Mail charge), so for some reason i've been charged £3.01, guessing that's VAT as 20% of 15 is £3 and then they probably threw in a penny extra so that i'm in the bracket where i have to pay?

Any idea as to why i've be charged VAT since the item is under £15? I've printed out the receipts and bank charges to prove this, however, is there any point in discussing this with RoyalMail when i go to collect the item? I'm thinking i should pay and collect and deal with the refund request with HMRC? Not sure how that will go.

Really confused as to how they managed to charge me since the item is definitely under £15.

Did you buy the item at a discounted price?

Some retailers put the full value of the item on the customs declaration.

Xad

sk00bie1 wrote: »

Did you buy the item at a discounted price?

Some retailers put the full value of the item on the customs declaration.

Nope, paid full price. Item was via seller on AliExpress, paid $24.51 which showed up as £14.78 on my credit card.

There's another charge on my statement of 43 pence under "Non-Sterling Transaction Fee", but i think that's the credit card company's fee which is separate?

sk00bie1

£14.78 is very close to £15, they may have used a different coversion rate and so it ended up being over £15 that way.

I don't suppose you'll know until you see the customs declaration on the label!