Are all goods imported from China liable to import? DHL ripping me off!

Ask them for a breakdown of the cost.

We had something similar happen (also with DHL). As mentioned, ask for a cost breakdown. For us, a large part was actually VAT which you can claim back (if you're VAT registered).

mrka said:

I called them and waiting for their custom team to call back, the women I spoke to said it was all import charges... Something is not right here!

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Admin fee, duty, VAT.
The first tends to be a fixed charge in my experience. Can be a major chunk of your small bill.
VAT should be 20% of total cost. If the total cost including shipping is $30 then presume VAT to be 20% of that, $6 which is £4.59.

What size bill were you anticipating based on the codes? And are the codes used correct?

mrka said:

Are all goods liable to import taxes.

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Yes. All are subject to 1) import duty (according to the tarif code), the amount depending on the product. It could be zero it could be 25% and 2) VAT at 20% of the combined cost of the product, import duty, insurance and freight to UK.

mrka said:

I understand if you have FOB (freight on board) it's only up to the point of goods leaving china. And these shipping companies in the UK have to get the item to you.

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FOB means that the factory has to get the goods to the port and will have included the cost of this in the price. I thinks its pretty unlikley that an item for $30 will be shipped to any port by the factory, so it may well be an ex works price, which means the carrier has to pick up from the factory and will make a charge for this.

Its hard to be clear from the way you have set out your post.

DHL have an £11 charge on declared values of the kind I deal with, and of course the VAT.

You really have no alternative unless you can arrange your own customs clearance at the point of entry. The 11 quid is for them paying the VAT on your behalf and managing the process. The VAT you either get back or you don't depending on your status.I don't see frankly, what the beef is. I cannot go to Felixstowe, or Stanstead or Liverpool to collect a three hundred quid parcel, that's just silly. If on the other hand you're having a container load, you'll be having a freight forwarder do all this for you instead - but you still pay for it!

You also have no control over who actually delivers it - Royal Mail, UPS, DHL or others and DHL are NOT the most expensive. How much would you charge to collect a parcel, assess the value, complete customs documentation, pay the VAT and then deliver it to your customer?

How long was the consignment held at customs if at all ?

If the declared value of the package is below the Government's limit, then DHL, Fedex, UPS, TNT and good old Royal Mail just deliver them - no cost. If the valuation (or as I suspect) the lottery as to which conveyor belt your package gets put onto means they have to do work, on your behalf, then you get charged because they could not just deliver it - it had to be recorded, documented, duty checked, VAT paid and that costs them money, so you pay. If your Fedex parcels arrived free, then that was simply luck, or a very low value declaration.

DHL for example, now have three separate systems.If the parcel feeds into some of their hubs and they know it requires VAT paying, they might even phone you up from Hong Kong or China and get you to pay. They got obviously loads of phone slam downs when a foreign voice says they are DHL - so now they give you in advance their waybill number and you can log onto DHL's UK web site or use their app to pay the duty. Normally though, you get a message - through the app in my case, and again, you make payment. Other times, you get a card through the door asking you to pay. UPS will accept payments for this at the door, but again prefer you to go online. Royal mail do the same. DHL will usually require on-line, while TNT might deliver the goods, then send you a bill. They don't accept on-line, or telephone, and want you to pay via BACS, which is tricky when now as my bank checks a/c and sort code with the name, you discover the account name (which they do NOT tell you) is Fedex - and you put the waybill number as reference. That works really well.

Getting VAT receipts for all of these payments is a total pain. DHL show you the VAT on screen and the £11 handling, but if you pay it, the receipt screen has the total only, so if you need the VAT showing, you MUST print the screen before paying. Daft really.

The other thing to consider is that many of the Chinese firms put totally random value on the customs declarations and even strange descriptions. An £800 order could be shown as £200 on the customs declaration. Of course you must notify HMRC so you can correct the underpayment, and we all know exactly how to do this and absolutely do it every time this happens. It's very inconvenient.

DHL are absolute morons, but usually £11 is for "Disbursement Advance Payment" and the rest is VAT which is reclaimable for most.

1. tariff threshold of UK is about £15, and your products value £30
2. DHL customs duties have minimum service fee which is about £11
3. Low declaration is forbiddened, If DHL assum some products low declaration, there is a fine as well.

I'm getting very frustrated with Fedex and TNT now - they make paying the duty/vat so damn hard. Links that don't work, or require you to know the invoice number, not waybill number, but as you haven't got the invoice, you can't pay. On top - when you actually speak to them, they can't even take a phone payment, and advise you to a BACS transfer. What kind of idiotic system is this?

Re DHL online payment screen. We have never voluntarily been given a VAT invoice and always have to email them asking for it. When it comes to HMRC taxes, the fast parcel operators must have weight. Why is their 'advance payment fee' or whatever garbage explanation, not taxed UK VAT? Why don't they just say this fee is for their customs handling service? Maybe utterance of the word, 'service', which is what it clearly is, has something to do with it, I can only guess.

Anyway, the biggie, of course, is that sometime next year the £15 minimum threshold will be removed and ALL imports, no matter how small, will be taxed. The government seems to want the foreign supplier to register and pay this up front. Mmmm... So if your foreign supplier does not register and has not paid tax in advance for your £3.99 widget from China, you can look forward to the customs handling fee from the Post Office (currently £8 I think, plus your 20% VAT on the £3.99, so total cost £12.79). The Ebay fireworks will be fun to watch. (Oh, and this looks like an EU thing but we are doing it anyway.) Personally, I think it is a good thing to encourage more retail and manufacture in our own country but I would rather it was done with less slight of hand; perhaps open sanctions against China until they pull up their ethical socks? Too late for that now I guess, as successive governments have been unable to support home industry and such goods would simply come disguised via other countries anyway but at elevated cost to us. Ethics and international trade, mmm, discuss.

Little bit of advice for any VAT registered company buying stuff from somewhere like China (if you have sufficient cash flow) is instruct them to declare the full value you are paying them on the commercial invoice and to not undervalue as many of them, against international regulations, would otherwise do, thinking that it is a favour to you. This way, you may have to pay more up front in VAT (which you will get back) but you don't have to figure out how the hell you correct for an under declaration or worry about an inspection asking after it, as paulears mentions above.

I must say that I wonder how on earth HMRC would ever want to investigate/do enquiries on the larger ebay sellers when the documentation is anything less than clear to the parties involved, let alone an outsider. I can't cope with doing the system the recommended way, so I'm issuing invoices and paying the VAT on what people actually pay - the very variable amounts ebay pay get even more confused by the facts they also invoice for fees that they haven't taken from payments. I'm doing the same thing with import charges - whatever the VAT amount is I use that figure on a generated invoice that has the handling charge as £12 or whatever, and then the amount of the VAT - I'm just working on the assumption that if I pay DHL £50, and £12 is handling, then the rest must be the VAT content, but I cannot find any correlation between the figures. Last week I got two identical parcels, each with identical contents and identical Chinese documents in the plastic wallets. TNT sent me two requests for the payment, which I did a few hours apart. Only after delivery did I notice the VAT applied was different - I don't think this was a Chinese error, but simply TNT got one wrong. One I think was too much, the other too little, but even averaging them out it doesn't come to within ten quid of what I paid. As we have no way to put wrong calculations right, what more can we do?

The increase in freight costs seems to make a big impact, but the extra fees for this and the extra fees for that make it next to impossible to be 100% accurate. Quite a few suppliers now use Paypal I note and that's another country involved in the cost side - the cost price, the fees for Paypal, currency conversions fees - how real cost prices are even calculated are beyond me.

More and more Chinese suppliers are selling on ebay, and I have occasional complaints as to why I am selling for £600, when they can buy the same thing from somebody else for £499 - that would be an extra £132 before delivery they would not be expecting. They'd also get the shock long after they ordered it!