The Shop on the Borderlands sells many things to many countries. Up till this year, our position on import duties and tariffs has been, more or less:  'if you want to  buy it, we'll post it: you are best placed to look up exactly what the country you live in charges for importing the things you've chosen to buy, and the postal service or courier will sort that out for you for a small fee'.  I'm sure this put some people off buying from us, but it was fairly clear to customers (we gave them warnings about it) and very easily manageable for us.

Then Mr Trump decided he was going to Tariff All the Things at extremely short notice (like less than a month!) 

In an attempt to make the filthy Foreigner (ie, us) pay rather than the US citizen, he insisted that not only would there be no exceptions for small parcels, but anyone who bought stuff from outside the USA and had it posted to them, would be billed at least $80 unless the seller prepaid the tariff.  

So suddenly we had to try to work out what the US tariff was going to be for everything we sold so we could charge and post appropriately.  This was complicated by the fact that tariffs are not based on where the Shop is based, or where the company that designed and commissioned the product is based, but where the physical object was made.  So, for example, some D&D books are printed in the USA, but some are printed in China, and some in Belgium.

And there's no way to predict where a specific book was printed, without taking it off the shelf and rummaging through it in the hope that it will have  'printed in Lithuania' written on it somewhere (Lithuania is a bit of a hotbed of RPG printing...)  Some books have no indication where they were printed at all, so you have to guess.  Some of our stock is 50 years old. Doesn't matter.  We still have to declare where it was made. 

Anyway, we did that for all the 12000ish Things in the Shop.  And we gave them all international product classification codes (which is how you declare you're selling dice and not books for tax purposes, for example) 

And we did it twice, because the first solution we had didn't work. (It was a quicker job the second time since the data was in and just had to be moved, but still. ) 

So, I tested ordering various products and they seemed to be getting what we thought was the right amount of tariff/customs fee appearing on them. Then we got a pleading email from a hopeful American, unable to find the thing they specially wanted in the USA, so we let them order - a book printed in the UK. They got charged the amount we expected by Royal Mail, 10% tariff plus 50p admin, and a week later, their book had reached them!  Hurray! 

So it all works now, right?  IF ONLY. We got another pleading American email, so we let that guy order too, and in a surge of confidence, turned off our message saying 'sorry no orders to the USA for now.'

But.  We put US Order #2 through the Royal Mail system, for three books made in Italy, and... RM charged us 50p admin fee for doing the duty for us, and nothing more.  But they were printed in Italy! Italy has a 15% tariff! 

So we rang Royal Mail, and said: why no tariff?  And they said: Oh it's fine. Tariffs don't apply to books.  

So we rang off and reinspected US Order #1, which was definitely a book, and definitely printed in the UK, and for which we were definitely billed 10% of the value for the tariff a week and a half ago.  And boggled. 

(I might not have got all the terminology 100% right, but I'm increasingly dubious that anyone has got this 100% right) 

Update:Parcel #1 had got tangled up in the massive update project and went out with the HS code saying it was a boxed board game by accident. So I think we're OK sending books without billing tariffs for them. Or, I hope so...

I read some old books about boats (and ships) and decided to ramble about them here.

( Read more... )

One thing all these books had in common was that they are print format, so I can read them 3 inches from my nose. I am definitely struggling a bit to read stuff at laptop screen distance at the moment, so I have been to the optician and ordered, with some fear and dread, some varifocal glasses. I hope I like them, they cost enough!