This is a tip, from my experience, for people selling their Amiga hardware internationally.
If you have never sold or bought hardware from abroad, you really have to consider that the person buying the product will be hit by (possibly very high) import duties. Selling between EU countries doesn't count as there are no cross-border fees, but if you are selling from/to any other nation please consider this:
- When sending your parcel be sure to clearly mark it as a Gift even if you do receive payment for it. When you fill out the customs form make sure to tick the relevant box.
- The declared value is normally useless, because even if you declare it worth $50,000 and the parcel gets lost in the post internationally THEY WILL NOT REFUND YOU. Instead they'll blame the post office of the other country. The declared value is simply there to allow the customs to calculate the import duties.
Now, this (the commercial value declaration) is a requirement when buying NEW merchandise over the internet, in this case you are not paying the origin country's taxes (VAT) but you pay your own country's taxes.
For example if I buy a DVD from Amazon.co.uk I am only charged the price before VAT, so the cost is actually the advertised price less 17% (or whatever the UK tax is) and then when I receive the parcel I am charged a 15% local tax on the top of the sale price + some customs handling fees.
But in our case, let's say that you want to be very "honest" and let the customs charge the person who is buying the product their local duties; consider that most of the Amiga hardware sold is used, which means that you already paid the tax at the time of purchase in your country of origin.
This obviously depends on individual laws, and I am no lawyer but I think that in most cases taxes should NOT be charged on used products as they already charged you when you bought the product when it was new.
So the bottom line is: what do you have to gain by declaring a high commercial value on such a shipment? You won't get anything out of it and the person receiving the parcel will have to pay a pointless surcharge and not everybody can afford it! The best thing is to declare that the parcel has NO commercial value -- or 0.
As an example of such stupidity I can mention the case when I bought what I thought was a used PCMCIA card (but it turned out to be an incompatible piece of junk). The seller was in the US and charged me US$5 for the card. Unfortunately he also declared a value of $50 on the parcel which in turn meant that I had to pay around $15 of import duties (taxes+handling), which was basically three times as much as I paid for the card in the first place! I managed to get the problem resolved, and Canada Customs eventually refunded my money, but not everybody is so lucky.
