A short while ago I bought some snowboarding pants (and a t-shirt). Even though the delivery charge was fairly high and knowing that some kind of import tax would have to be paid, the gear was still a good deal: total charge $88.33 (using our snowboard gear discount codes).



Shortly after the order I received an email from UPS telling me that I hadn’t paid the import charges and that I sould contact them straight away… OK, no problem. But it was when I spoke to them that the deal went kinda crappy. I was set to pay duty tax, V.A.T and some admin fee because I wasn’t a UPS account holder!

It’s probaby the case that I’m totally naive about all of this – but I wasn’t expecting to pay V.A.T. Worst of all though was the dibursement fee. A charge I incurred because UPS were handling the import procedures and I didn’t have an account with them. That’s nice. Sure there are costs that need to be covered but I wasn’t made aware of that before I ordered and chose UPS… maybe I should have trawled their site first and looked for small print?

The total import charge was $36.49 – around 40% of the cost. But actualy when you take the delivery charge away, the goods only cost about $54, so the cost of importing them is looking pretty high!

I actually thought I was gonna escape the payment; it was back in July when I spoke to them and they said that I would receive an invoice in the post. Getting on to two months later and it hadn’t arrived so I was kinda smiling… but what’s that saying they have about the certainty of taxes? Last week the letter below arrived – damn it 🙂

So the total cost of buying in the snowboarding pants and a t-shirt was $124.82. That’s not bad, but it’s not the bargain that I was originally aiming for. The funny part about all of this though is that I don’t even like the pants – so I’m gonna sell them on eBay. At least they’ve still got the tags on…




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