TLDR;
International shipping from the UK is now even more complicated. If you want to order from outside of the UK, please use the contact button above and tell me what you want to order (including any options) and your address, and I will get a price for you. This price will now include duties that used to be collected by customs, so should work out overall faster and cheaper.
If you want to know why, read on, otherwise give this one a miss, it's too depressing.
Come back next week when there is a nice post about writing a VIC 20 game.
Or there is 50% of my Patreon if you want to read it now.
Good News Everyone
Thank you Royal Mail for sending me this great news.
Yes, more of my parcels can now be sent duty paid.
Great news...?
Hang on, how does that work again?
How it used to Work
The customer selects a product and selects some options and hits checkout.
The postage costs are pre-set based on size and weight of the parcel and destination.
The customer pays for the item, say £100, and the postage, say £15, so £115 gets paid to Tindie or whatever marketplace is being used.
I pack the order, pay the £15 for the shipping and off the order goes.
In many countries, the order will arrive, customs will inspect the paperwork and decided how much duty, if any, is due and ask the buyer to pay the duty, say 20%, plus a handling fee, say a total of £25.
In the past, the US has a high point of entry for duties, so most orders went through without needing any duties paid. That is no longer the case.
The EU also had different rules for items under €150, that has also now changed, so everything is going to need duties paid.
Once I mark the order as shipped, the total the buyer paid, minus the platform fees and payment processing fees will be payable to me. So I get about £100 of that £115.
As the seller, I need to pay for the parts to make the order, and pay for the postage in advance, and I then get reimbursed some time later.
That used to be almost immediately, but now there may be delays of several weeks, so I need to have enough float in my account to pay for all the parts and postage until I get reimbursed.
That is manageable, with a bit of planning, even with the extra delays.
New Rules
Good news says the Royal Mail in a series of messages.
Now what needs to happen is I need to pay the duty as part of the postage costs to many destinations including the US and parts of the EU.
Previously there used to be a drop down box that let me select "sender pays the duty" or "recipient pays the duty".
That is now greyed out, and is fixed as "I will pay any taxes, duties & fees (PDDP)" - Postal Delivery Duties Paid.
The amount varies, but 20% is common in Europe, the US now looks to be 25%. So I now need to pay the £15 shipping, plus 20-25% of the item value, in this case, £25. Plus handling fees, only 50p this time.
So now I need to pay £40 to ship the item.
In theory now there should be nothing extra to pay at customs, so the buyer should receive their item faster (although I understand there may be state taxes on top of this in some states).
That was the US, lets try Germany.
That is also on a £100 item, looks like 20% of item and postage costs? so £35 to ship a £100 item to Germany.
(there is also a new "temporary" EU rule that adds €3 for every type of item in an order, I have yet to see that being charged as part of the postage. It is far more of an issue for low value, multi-item orders, most of mine are high value, small number of items. I have heard that they may still be collecting this by sending cards from customs, which makes a mockery of enforcing collecting the duty from the sender if they are still going to card the recipient.)
That's great. So now I can't just pay the shipping, I need to deal with the duty as well.
However, there is a problem.
How do I get that 20-25% of the item cost from the buyer?
Why is that now my job anyway?
Sticks on Revolver, track 1, "Yeah, I'm the tax man"
Option 1 - Increase the item price
One suggestion is to increase the price of the item to cover this, so reprice the £100 item at £120. That would cover the cost, but now the order paperwork would say the item cost is £120, so the amount due would now be 20% of that, £24. So it would need to be even higher, £125 so that the duty would be £25 and I would get the £100 for the item, but the paperwork would be all wrong, and the buyer would have paid a bit more than they need. It also makes things look less appealing if they are 25% more expensive.
Option 2 - Add it to the postage
This is what I was initially doing for the 10% US tariff. I setup a number of postage rates, each inflated by enough to cover about 10% of the item cost. That sort of worked, but just made the postage look very expensive and if the customer buys several things, I lose money on the shipping.
Now I need to look at 20-25%, that's not really an option.
I can't even do it per item, as something like the Minstrel 2 can very from £130 -£230 depending on the options, built kit, with sockets, with membranes and overlays etc.
So that would mean between £26 and £46 duty at 20%.
Option 3 - Get the Marketplace to collect it
That would be nice, but currently it looks like only Lectronz has that option, but I have not seen how that works in practice yet.
I would also need to go through and work out the amount of duty for each country or state and setup separate shipping rates for each one. An awful lot of admin, and these things keep changing, so I would need to keep on top of that or risk over- or under-charging.
Option 4 - "Gift, value $1"
This is how all the far east marketplaces used to get around this, and the sort of thing they are trying to fix with these new rules. I only ever ship with everything fully declared. I am not interested in trying to cheat the system, no matter how broken, unfair or unworkable it is.
None of this shows on the postal labels, or the CN22 customs form, other than a small PDDP logo, so it doesn't even look like anything has been paid. Great work guys, thank you again. Makes my products look more expensive and then make it look like I am ripping people off.
Even if I get all that working, the other problem is one of finance. I now need to buy the parts to make the product, and then pay the postage say £15, plus the 20-25% duty and the fees, all in advance out of my own pocket.
I will need a lot more of a float if I am paying out a quarter of the order value on top of everything else, and then only getting that back a few weeks later.
I have no idea how that will work in the case of a refund, do I simply lose the 25% I paid out as well as the postage?
The New Plan
All I can suggest is that I will have to calculate international shipping on a case by case basis.
After I lost quite a bit of money paying the duty on the outstanding orders I had to post, I have set the stores to UK only for now. I hate to have to do that, but I don't think it is going to be possible to have this automatically calculated, and I certainly cannot afford to give away 25% of any more orders.
Please look at the blog posts and the store listings, work out what you want, and what options you want (that is important), and tell me that and your shipping address.
I will work out what the cost of shipping will be and give you an accurate overall price (which should work out cheaper than having to pay part of that later at customs).
I can then send a fully itemised PayPal invoice with all the details on.
I am sorry that sounds really clunky, but that is the only way I can see to make this work.
I also realise that makes everything look more expensive and more trouble, but I hope you will be prepared to work with me to get things too you without either of us losing too much money.
Sorry of that was all a bit ranty, I was quite positive in last weeks post,
looking at listing more things and more widely, but now all the changes have
kicked in, I am going to have to rein it all in again.
Thank you all for your past, and hopefully future, custom.
Ordering
All items are still available.
I can ship worldwide.
The only problem is I can't get the shipping and duty to be calculated automatically.
If you want to order something, please use the contact link at the top of the page and tell me:
- What you want to order, including options - see blog posts and listings for reference
- The delivery address
I will then send you an invoice which you can pay via PayPal, or if in the UK, by bank transfer.
Sorry to have to do this, and I know this is going to affect sales, but please understand it is the only option I have right now.
Patreon
If you enjoy posts like the ones I normally write, you can support me via Patreon, and get access to advance previews of blog posts, and exclusive posts.
You also get progress updates on new projects and other behind the scenes updates, as well as access to my Patreon only Discord server for even more regular updates, and to discuss your own projects.
I am very grateful to my existing patrons, I need this even more if I am going to be losing out on orders.
It would be wonderful to get enough support on Patreon to allow me to concentrate on writing more and better posts rather than spending all my time dealing with shipping admin.
I have set this to 50% off your fist month if you want to try it out.
