Sorry this is another "admin" post. I have a lot of posts ready to roll and currently on Patreon, but all of them are waiting on one thing or another before I can post them here.
I am not here to push Patreon, but I will just say there is 50% at the moment if you are interested
How To Order
I thought I should just explain the current best way to order things from me.
Please contact me using the contact email at the top of this page.
Tell me your shipping address so I can work out the postage.
Tell me which items you would like to order, including the options as that changes the price (e.g. kit / built, with IC sockets, with serial card etc.)
I can send you a PayPal link or an invoice if you are in the UK and prefer to pay via Bank Transfer.
PayPal should allow you to pay with various cards or PayPal balance etc. even in multiple installments, so that should cover most things.
Background
I have set Tindie to UK only, but I can still ship worldwide. Changes to the postal rules means it is not currently possible to automatically calculate the postage at checkout on sites like Tindie.
Several of the places I used to ship many orders to, including the US and many EU countries, now require that I collect the import duty from the buyer and pay that to the Royal Mail when I buy the postage.
The amount appears to vary from state to state and country to country, and I have not been able to find a list of all the countries which require this, and the how the duty is calculated for each one, and it keeps changing.
The best option at the moment is a bit tedious and creates a lot of extra work. I have to go through the process of creating the postage right up to the final pay now button where it tells me what it calculates the duty to be (if any).
I can then pass that back to the buyer and give them a total cost for items, shipping and duty.
It does make the postage look very expensive, but it should work out overall cheaper as the duty would previously have been collected at customs, and you would be billed for their estimation of the duty and their handling fee, which I understand was £10-15 depending on location. The Royal Mail only charge £1 handling fee when I pay up front.
Some countries currently do not need the duty up front, but I have still disabled all international destinations, as I don't want to get into the situation that happened recently where I had a couple of orders that were placed on Tindie, but when I came to post them the rules had changed and I now had a pay the duty. (thank you to the customer that did pay the duty after I contacted them, I felt really bad having to do that, but can't afford to lose 25% of the order value.)
Why Did This Happen?
Greed.
This is my understanding of how things work (or rather used to work), apologies if I have got any of it wrong, it's not very clear, and never was.
Previously there was a "de minimis" rule where customs would not bother about low value parcels. It was not worth their time to collect $2 on a $10 parcel. The US had a limit which I think was a very generous $800. The EU was €150. (although we used to have a free-trade deal but that was taken away from us...)
The EU is apparently replacing that with a €3 per item charge (or rather type of item), although I don't have any way to pre-pay that and I am not aware of it being charged on any parcels I have sent.
The UK in theory still has £135 limit or something like that, although I am sure I have been charged on less before, and I understand that is planned to be phased out in a few years. Yay! more problems to come.
The old system worked for many years. The customs could concentrate on the larger items, and things which arrive on pallets or in containers, rather than in small boxes.
But then the governments got greedy. Under the guise of "protecting local trade", they removed the de minimis rule, meaning customs now had to bother with tiny amounts.
This created backlogs in customs as they suddenly had to do lots more work, and people would have started to receive demands to pay $2 on a $10 item, plus a $15 handling fee and I am sure many would have refused to pay.
This led to an ad-hoc version of the old system where they were just waiving small parcels through when they were busy.
The greed then kicked in again and they decided to shift the responsibility for collecting the duty onto the shipper.
That is probably fair enough if you are a large business, but for a tiny business like me it is a lot of extra work.
I used to have the option to pay the duty up-front as part of the postage. I did offer this, but obviously no one selected it as it may the shipping cost look ridiculous.
Now the drop-down box is greyed out and I have no choice but to pay the duty up-front.
An Example
Say you want to order a $100 item.
Previously I had a set postage price per region, say $20 and you could place an order directly and would be charged $120.
Customs would then sometimes waive the parcel through with no costs, other times they would charge $20-$25 duty (depending on state or country) plus a handling fee ($10-$15).
That would make either $120 or up to $160.
Now it will be $100 plus $20 plus $20-$25 (plus their $1 handing fee), so up to $146.
Other Options
Move to the UK - although I wouldn't recommend that, for many reasons.
One person did suggest it would be cheaper for them to fly over here and take items back in their hand luggage. Not sure what would happen at the "anything to declare" desk if you said you had a PET ROM/RAM board and a Minstrel 3 kit.
There are shipping services I used to see people use in the past where I would post to a UK address, and the parcels would be forwarded on to the sender by a third party company.
I have not seen any orders to those places recently, I don't know if they are still operating, but they presumably have the same issues.
Maybe you can find one of those and place the order to a UK address, and the third party will deal with the international shipping and associated costs.
Conclusion
None of this is ideal, sorry.
A re-instated de-minimis with a reasonable limit, or ideally a free-trade deal would solve this, but that would only benefit the end customers and small businesses, and I don't think any of us count in the grand plan of making the obscenely rich even richer.
Anyway, that is where we are today, I don't want to give up, so I will keep trying to make this work however I can.
I am very grateful to anyone who can navigate this mess of a system and still order things. I have done my best to try to make it work, but it is going to require a lot more effort on the part of both buyer and seller.
Sorry that was a little ranty and political, it is very frustrating that I want to make things, and I have people who want to buy my things but the way the world is at the moment makes it increasingly difficult.
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 they way things are going.
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.
