Buying from UK websites - Beware

[LadyEloise1]

Just beware ordering from UK websites.
I ordered one item of clothing for £16 plus delivery charge of £7.99.
The custom value was put at €27.78 so I had to pay €6.38 to Customs and €3.50 to An Post to get it delivered.

How do they calculate the customs value? I’ve just about got my head around duty and VAT. I thought the value was cost and shipping, less the UK taxes???

I’ve just ordered an item from uk that has a high RRP price but always offers hefty discounts to seem like a bargain. Worrying now that customs will value it at the higher price.

The €3.50 to An Post really is the final kicker.

One of the joys of Brexit.

I'm fairly careful about this, but got caught buying from a .ie version of a website and had to pay customs. It was annoying because there was no indication of this on the website. It was espares .ie if that helps anyone to avoid.

Thanks @DramaAlpaca

God, I know. I just found a dress I wanted last year but missed out on. It's on eBay. £185 for the dress, £30 for postage and £95 in duties. So annoying.

Dd loves buying vintage clothes on depop, but we end up paying at least half again on charges.

From what I've read Christmas is going to be a complete nightmare between all the Brexit charges and then transport delays and extra costs.

Just had this with a kimono. For reasons I cannot fathom the retailer put the value on the customs order as 3x more than I actually paid for it. So a €45 import fee. Very frustrating.

They generally use the full list price to calculate duty and VAT, which is a pain. It's to avoid having the people you are buying from putting a falsely low value on the item when the buyer has actually paid more.

On the other hand I ordered some quilting fabric from the US and that's quite a difficult thing to look up the list price of as you need to know the size of the cut etc. Some person in AddressPal in the US obviously opened my package and couldn't be arsed so just valued it all at €30. I paid over €100 with about a 20% discount. So that one was a win.

Some companies will take off the UK taxes and add the EU ones, most notably the horrible Amazon, but Asda do it too. Mostly you end up paying EU duty and VAT on top of UK taxes, so tax is calculated on already taxed goods.

The same thing happened to me with espares.ie too!