UK Shipping & VAT

For the UK Robo3D'ers

Rough travel estimate and did anyone have to pay a huge Customs invoice when it arrived?

 

It was about 5 days for mine to be delivered and that included a weekend.

Vat and duty came to £36.30 but I did notice that the robo guys had marked it up as a gift (good work guys). I believe others have paid more. I seem to remember someone saying they had paid about £80.00 vat and duty.

 

Nice, thanks. I can totally live with that

 

I had to pay £101. 98p for my robo, it had 2 rolls of 1kg filament in the box , I think I was ripped off

 

but I was just glad to get my printer

 

Customs notification was texted through to me this morning, went on the website to pay it and had a nice surprise when it only came to £35.96. Paid it and it'll be delivered tomorrow!

 

VAT is "Value Added Tax", better described as a Purchase Tax.

This is added to nearly all purchases at a rate of 20% in the UK.

On foreign purchases this will be calculated on the total cost of the item plus any delivery charge associated with it. There can also be a small import duty associated with foreign purchases.

My Robo3D was marked up on the import documentation as a "gift" so there was no value associated with it. VAT was therefore applied to just the £156.00 (or so) delivery charge plus the import duty, making my VAT charge £36.30. If the printer had been marked as being valued at what I actually paid my VAT would have been nearer £110.00.

I can only guess that some peoples printer had a value marked, which had VAT applied, or the customs agent did not believe it was a gift and gave it a value to which VAT was applied. This made the charge that much more.

I hope this makes sense.

 

It certainly does!

Also any gift valued over £15 you also have to pay duty for, so I'm a little surprised that I didn't have to pay more plus I couldn't find anywhere on the documentation that the shipment was marked as a gift.

So I guess customs either messed up or I got lucky and they didn't bother investigating it too much.

 

as long as you don't have taxes on breathing you're good

 

I payed £35 ish too maybe a little more as i had 1kg of PLA but it was under £40