Whats going on with shipping to the UK/EU? Now you need a VAT number collect taxes and what not?
I sent a friend a used graphics as a gift and they hit him with taxes on the declared value $20, plus on the shipping cost, which is kinda fucked up! I could only imagine if I was to put the real value of the card, it would have been crazy tax.
Most customs in Europe are just scamming people. Law has changed since the 1st of July where all goods coming from outside EU whatever their value (even 0.1€) must have the VAT paid.
The thing is ALL carriers apply extortion fees (handling fees) of 15 to 25€
per parcel whatever the declared value.
They justify that by saying they have to hand over the parcel to the customs, fill in the custom declaration, etc.
They charge you even for parcels that weren't stopped by the customs (obviously not 100% of the parcels are stopped, they apply a sampling method).
Also I worked for those shipping companies (automated lines) and what they call "handling fees" is just a barcode/QR code scanning on an automated conveyer belt.
Oh and doing the custom clearance on behalf of someone who hasn't given their consent is illegal too. Carriers will tell you it's impossible for individuals to do, which is an other lie, in most countries you can anticipate and do it online for free.
Altough most countries still have an exemption rule for gifts of low value (30 to 45€) customs don't care and classify everything as commercial goods.
The best part is you have 15 days to pay the customs and by doing so you have accepted the classification they made and associated fees.
Now you can choose not to pay and make a claim, it takes minimum 3 months to get an answer. By that time the goods would have long been sent back or destroyed.
It's also frequent customs apply a 1:1 conversion rate between currencies. That happened many times to me, I sent goods from NZ to Europe with a declared value in NZD as per NZ law, and properly showed as such on the label, still people got the VAT charged as if they were €... At the end it was as high as 40+% of the declared value in tax (20% VAT applied on a currency worth 1.7 times what it should).
Most people would be more than happy to pay the VAT if there weren't those unjustified fees.