UPS Import Woes

A short while ago I bought some snowboarding pants (and a t-shirt) from DogFunk, an online store in America. I like DogFunk: they have a great selection, often have great sales and the staff are real friendly. Even though the delivery charge was fairly high and knowing that some kind of import tax would have to be paid, the gear was still a good deal: total charge £88.33

Shortly after the order I received an email from UPS telling me that I hadn't paid the import charges and that I sould contact them straight away... OK, no problem. But it was when I spoke to them that the deal went kinda crappy. I was set to pay duty tax, V.A.T and some admin fee because I wasn't a UPS account holder!

It's probaby the case that I'm totally naive about all of this - but I wasn't expecting to pay V.A.T. Worst of all though was the dibursement fee. A charge I incurred because UPS were handling the import procedures and I didn't have an account with them. That's nice. Sure there are costs that need to be covered but I wasn't made aware of that before I ordered and chose UPS... maybe I should have trawled their site first and looked for small print?

The total import charge was £36.49 - around 40% of the cost. But actualy when you take the delivery charge away, the goods only cost about £54, so the cost of importing them is looking pretty high!

I actually thought I was gonna escape the payment; it was back in July when I spoke to them and they said that I would receive an invoice in the post. Getting on to two months later and it hadn't arrived so I was kinda smiling... but what's that saying they have about the certainty of taxes? Last week the letter below arrived - damn it :)

So the total cost of buying in the snowboarding pants and a t-shirt was £124.82. That's not bad, but it's not the bargain that I was originally aiming for. The funny part about all of this though is that I don't even like that pants - so I'm gonna sell them on eBay. At least they've still got the tags on...