Update on Ordering

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 here is the link if you are interested

• https://www.patreon.com/tynemouthsoftware

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.

• https://www.patreon.com/tynemouthsoftware

Game over?

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.

• https://www.patreon.com/tynemouthsoftware/posts/speeding-up-time-164650928

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:

1. What you want to order, including options - see blog posts and listings for reference
2. 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.

• https://www.patreon.com/tynemouthsoftware