I come up with $16.54. After searching through the labyrinthine and bewildering USPS web pages. Which is another thing I am not interested in doing a lot.
I don’t have any $16.54 stamps. After digging up the price I’d have to go to the post office, fill out a customs form, get in line, and transact business with them. Or maybe it can be done online, but the site I usually use for that with domestic mail is telling me I need a ZIP code for an address in France…
$51.48 minus $40 if you sell your extras to other people in Europe who don’t want to pay $20 postage for a $10 item.
Bottom line is: Shipping internationally is too expensive, too time and effort consuming, and too potentially costly if things go wrong for me to have any interest in doing it. Sorry.
Bad luck I guess. I try not to generalise too much from one case.
I have been buying and selling stuff on ebay (guitar pedals, cameras, electronics, vinyl records…) for over 22 years while living in five different countries and I only had two cases where things were lost. In one case, I was reimbursed by Royal Mail for the value of lost goods and the postage. The other case was during COVID when postal services were overwhelmed and I didn’t have the energy to chase it up with Deutche Post.
Just to be clear, I am not saying what anyone should do. I am just pointing out that there might be more options than we might have initially thought. Maybe this info is useful for someone in the forum, maybe not.
The problem with international shipping TO europe, lately, is when they decide the things you were sent have a monetary value, highball a lucky guess what it is since the gear looks professionally made, change you 25 euros on taxes, then tack on a 30 euro processing fee
In any case, this fee is the same irrespective of whether you get a PCB fabricated in China or you’ve been buying a PCB from some other person outside the EU.
Here a sample of what I get from the UK…
There aren’t even Custom Taxes, just VAT (15€) and processing fees (7.5€) = 22.5€.
Chronopost is part of laposte.
You don’t even understand how they compute these values, the declared value of the parcel was 200€ (for insurance purposes), which should amount to 40€ VAT…
It is f*cking expensive to get a “private” parcel from outside the EU.
The only affordable parcels from outside the EU are those from companies paying the taxes right at the source, JLPCB being one of them.
This is a special case because the goods were over 20 EUR. Not relevant to the synth stuff exactly. Here is how it works, perhaps this will resolve the confusion.
As soon as you hit the ~20 EUR mark (depending on the country) the customs hit you with:
VAT on the value of goods (15-25% depending on country again)
Processing fee (again variable, France is the most expensive, typically its around the 3 EUR mark)
Import tariff (aka excise duty) on the value of goods and postage combined (again depends on the country, I think its around 15%)
However, if you prepay the costs through the order (I can’t remember the initials of whatever system it is), then you save the processing fee and, I think, the mark for paying import tariffs goes up, I think to 100 EUR or something. And this is how we end up not paying much with JLCPCB, because its this prepaid kind of deal where you save a lot.
To continue, the Lego example is not directly relevant to one person sending the other person a PCB because:
A person to person transaction can usually can get exempted as a “gift” (value up to 45 EUR). Therefore a 10 EUR PCB from a person to a person is not the same as a 200 EUR order from a company to a person.
Alternatively, the person sending the order can declare a token value (e.g. 1 EUR). The customs workers are not bothered with these (especially if it is a letter envelope and there are no company markers on the outside). Again, this is NOT something that a company can do as they are legally obliged to insert the invoice in the parcel.
In the Netherlands they got rid of the ‘below 20 euro’ exemption. Technically when ordering from abroad you are liable for taxes for -all- purchases. Only exception there is is for gifts from a private individual to another private individual, up to a maximum of 40 or 45 euro value (can’t remember which).
Also if the taxes aren’t prepaid to the carrier, they will hit you with a service fee which is arbitrary and often higher than the total cost and taxes for small orders.
I can completely understand Richard not wanting to go through the hassle of finding out how to send stuff and what to pay for postage to all these different countries which may all have different rules, even if the recipient will foot the bill…
