Hi ian et all,
Super happy with the steady supply of dirty PCBs coming my way!
I hit one snag recently though: DHL in Holland seems to charge me tax plus a € 12 fee for every good over the value of € 22 that I receive, which is not a problem with the 5x5 boards, but hits when you have to do larger sizes.
Wondering whether it would be feasible to have the option of sending only half of the boards for half-ing the declared value of the shipment? For me, 2 or 3 boards per design revision would often do just as well. I understand the economic necessity for 10pcs at the board house - but I'd just love to have a way to avoid the surcharge (all in all: just shy of 50% of the total cost for 12x12cm boards).
Cheers
Gottfried
DHL suck major to .nl :) have lots of trouble with them regarding importduties. read more here: http://smdprutser.nl/blog/dhl-dyscalcul ... dling-fee/ (http://smdprutser.nl/blog/dhl-dyscalculia-what-do-you-get-for-15-eur-handling-fee/)
Were the costs calculated ok for you?
Hi Sjaak!
Ugh, that doesn't sound good ... my import duty was initially also wrongly calculated by DHL Netherlands. They were saying that the import duty is calculated over both, the value of the good and the cost of the shipping, and since the Commercial Invoice lacked the latter, they were using some default value. Provided them with my email invoice, after which they gave me another figure, which was ca 10 Euros less than before...
> They were saying that the import duty is calculated over both, the value of the good and the cost of the shipping
This is the same for Switzerland. Customs say that the value of the shipping has to include shipping. But they also waive all fees if the VAT is below CHF 5, which gives you a duty-free amount of about $60 (incl shipping). I would not mind it that much, but the handling fees can be up to $40, so everything exceeding $60 gets quite a bit more expensive.
Markus
I suspect one issue will be that the boards are factory packed so it would be more hassle than it is worth for them to unpack and repack a smaller quantity.
I know Ian was going to address this but one problem I've had is that no shipping value has been declared either on the package or the documentation, so DHL and UK customs have been assuming some stupid cost like £100 and based the charges on that. It appears to be impossible to do anything about this as DHL just throw it back to the customs people (which strictly speaking is correct) but trying to get any response out of them is like getting blood out of a stone. It's literally not worth spending the time - I can make more by doing something productive than taking the hours necessary to challenge them.
Ian, did you get anywhere with adding PostNL as a carrier? The main issue I and most other have with DHL is that their handling charge is usually as much or more than the VAT/Duty due.
This is a great idea and I will implement it after upgrading Dirty PCBs next week.
The shipping value in commercial invoice is a quirk of the API and the logistics company never fixed it. In next updater we just insert it separately so that should be fixed soon, but please don't flame.me when logistics fixes the API and you see two shipping charges :)
PostNL wasn't a problem, but the new logistics company was a.disaster and simply couldn't deliver. I spent a week debugging their API personally and they still refused to admit any problems or fix things. In the end we had to call and check on each package cause they never really shipped anything and they never provided any tracking at all... We now have to get a bonded warehouse in a free trade zone to handle this, but that's a panic attack for a different day...