Originally Posted by
focusv8
One advantage of requiring the business seller to collect the Duty and Tax on items below £135 is that UK customers avoid being charged on average £15 by the likes of Fedex, Parcelforce etc for processing and collecting the duty when £15 is quite a penalty on that value item.
Larger businesses in the U.S have been collecting the Vat and Duty for years and are either U.K Vat registered or use Worldpay or similar to process it.
Ebay have their Global Shipping program available to sellers to process the Vat and Duty and complete paperwork.
FedEx/UPS are utter robbing bastards when it comes to import duties. They literally pluck numbers from thin air, blame everyone else, then say you cannot dispute it without paying an up front charge, which often is higher than the original charges !!!
I will never buy anything from a seller that use either of those shippers again.
And I've never bought anything from any US seller where they have collected vat or duty up front. Although ebay's global shipping program is very good, as it gets stuff shipped at very sensible prices, and at least they too get all duties etc correct.