Hey guys,
I’ve been hit in the past with the fees for purchasing goods over 1k, it’s a bit a ridiculous I am fine with paying GST, however there’s usually a ridiculous $200 admin fee attached, I spent $1010 and got hit with a $300 ish bill.
Most places won’t declare below the threshold, which is completely fine and understandable. My issues have only seemed to come from FEDEX, does anyone have experience with other carriers?
Surely it's just $55 for the customs lodgement and $30 for AQIS inspection/lodgement? That's what Fedex charges for my various shipments from the US. The rest sounded like duty then GST on duty, the items themselves and freight.
For one of my purchases it was:
Duty $64.6
GST $138.3
Entry Fee: $83
Total: $285.9
Seems about correct to me. You're not going to avoid duty and GST via courier and they're going to pass on the government documentation fees to you along with their own administration costs.
Ah wonderful, around 25% for getting stuff in.
@BigBrickBoy: Depends if there's duty on the particular item and you can choose to do the customs clearance yourself if you wanted to. It's simple but will add a fair bit of time to delivery. You'd still have to pay the customs fee but you'd save the $20 or so the courier is charging to handle it for you.
so that's ~5% duty and 10% GST on everything…nothing out of the ordinary.
Blown away at how simple this post is, you know what you may need to pay for orders of $1,000 and complain that you need to pay the import tax, you know what you're signing up for stop trying to tax evade which is what you're trying to do by the looks of it.
I’m fine with paying GST, if I could prepay it, I’d do it. Duty I think is a bit unnecessary given that i am not a importer or mass importing products, but hey I’m uneducated in the manner. I’m getting annoyed in the hit & miss nature of it all. I think the admin fee is a joke as I’m basically paying them for the privilege of charging me, surely my GST and even the duty should pay for the admin fee.
I think it is very fair, they handle a majority of the paperwork, customs, and are the POC when customers needs information on behalf of yourself.
It's a very small price to pay whereas if you were to pay a broker to import the same product.
I still remember getting stung $150 GST (understandable) for a watch bought off ebay, then DHL proceeded to place another $85 in handling/admin. I think it's ridiculous if the original party (through you) has already paid the premium to express freight it.
It was just a 20cm x 20cm box…
Same, I would prefer if i could pay GST as required and not pay a guppy for the admin fees. If it was done beforehand, it wouldn’t be required to check.
There's a $50 (may have gone up by now as it's been a few years since I've done it) processing fee from customs. Do you expect DHL to wear that cost? Of course they're going to pass it on plus they're own administration costs of doing and submitting the forms for you.
I just feel it's a bit rough to be charged $50 or whatever it is for customs to perform a 2 second xray on a box and check the declaration. It's basically a licence to print money, i'd expected $50 to cover something that'd take half an hour to perform, not 1 minute.
You think that's bad, you mustn't have encountered stamp duty yet.
Problem is the bulk of those lodgement fees don't go to the carrier - it's Customs and AQIS who collects it. Even if you go do the clearance yourself in person, they'd still charge a similar fee.
I'm about to important a mobile phone which costs over $1K.
How can I avoid the admin fee or other nonsensical fees? Courier options are DHL, FedEx, Global Mail Direct, USPS (AusPost).
I'm fine with the entry fee of 80 something but don't want to pay the $200 admin fee that OP talks about.
This is the exact reason I wont buy bicycle wheels online. Never get a clear understand if you're going to get slapped with some huge fee or not.