Mobile-joker VAT?

[Guest evilking]

Has anyone ordered off mobile-joker before and had to pay vat or customs duties when it came to UK? Noticed that they have the mda compact for 389 euros (432 including cash-on-delivery and delivery charge) which works out to £298. Sim-free in the UK is £380 minimum.

[Guest fraser]

The customs thing is quite often pot luck, or down to the supplier. Some pre-declare the value on the package to speed up processing (lowers delivery times), others just chance it. I used to import a lot of stuff, and learned a few tricks to avoid VAT, though none of them would apply here really.

[Guest Disco Stu]

My mate at Fed-Ex says that any parcel from outside the EC of a value over £18 (?) is subject to VAT & duties. These will be collected by the PO as agents for Customs.

From previous experience, this was however somewhat random although quite a few parcels from the US & Germany (for example) were held up at the main Post Office in Mount Pleasant for up to 6 months before I got them.

I take it this was what you were asking about.

[Guest fraser]

Sort of. The £18 one was handy as it was mostly DVDs I was ordering. One site did a lot of business to the UK, so they realised about individually sending each one. Was still cheaper to do that than to buy an inferiour version of the movie in the UK!

Other places would mark down the £18 value for you if you asked nicely. Certain kinds of shipping (anything fast) would guarantee a VAT check (Fed Ex etc have deals with the VAT man to speed things up for them I think). Same with some companies, you'd get hit every time. There was some forum activity on how best to do it that was quite handy!

[Guest RISc]

Another trick is to gift wrap an item. It actually makes customs think it really is a gift and let it through. Customs are really looking for large scale importers trying to dodge VAT. From experience FedEx, UPS, TNT, DHL are the worst wehn it comes to duties they make sure you get hit. Some like UPS also charge you for paying VAT on your behalf. If uisng a national carrier in our case Royal Mail you are less likely to be hit with VAT. Custosm give less importance to these packages as proportion of commercial importing is smaller more of low value friends and family stuff. USPS seems awesome comapred to royal mail I ordered a few parts for my rework stations costs nothing comapred to UK prices. Postman was checking to make sure it's not a bomb outside my door (he's a joker) in under 48 hours ;)