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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 2109570, member: 71234&quot;]<i>Lying on the customs forms, I do not advise this to anyone. This is a potential problem. Foreign government customs are not stupid. Anything strange on the customs label will get it opened and they will check it. Especially anything marked as &#039;gift&#039;. </i></p><p><br /></p><p>Gift is certainly pointless, I always tick merchandise.&nbsp; Otherwise there is no downside. No one but an idiot would ship something and describe it as $20 Gold coin. Value $2000.&nbsp; For me a similar item&nbsp; goes out as numismatic material, value $20.</p><p><br /></p><p>The truth is that no one does any more inspection of postal packages than they can avoid. It is even an informal formality in Canada, where the Can$20 import threshold for charging local consumption taxes has been abandoned for years on postal packages as simply not cost effective. The big money for governments is in clearing container imports, by sea and air. One man can collect hundreds of thousands in revenue in a day, all they do at the postal clearance is run stuff past a sniffer dog and X-ray some of the packages for weapons. Many thousands if low vaklue packages a day are not&nbsp; worth inspecting for the possible revenue raised, and they certainly do not open many packets. They have far tastier packages to open, when they do, than a small packet of a few coins or notes. The dogs and the X-ray machines provide enough things that are worth inspecting to earn their paychecks.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>For the insurance part, if you do not put the right amount on the customs label (at least for high priced items that I sell) the insurance will be voided</i>.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is simply not true. Third party transit insurers simply do not care what the&nbsp; customs value is, and in any case the package, if lost, loses the customs form with it. For the insurers, a low customs valued package is a benefit, it travels safer and costs them less money in claims.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Your rationality that countries consider scanning a useless frill is totally wrong. Most but not all do it. To what extent? That&#039;s left up to the country. That&#039;s the only way they track their packages the same way we do. So at least 1% of them will get scanned.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>Most&nbsp; countries have some sort of tracking system for premium postal methods, but you have to pay the equivalent of $8 in the UK, for example, to get this. Just about everyone would not spend that amount since the post arrives safely without it. It&#039;s not the countries&#039; postal services but the populations of the countries that consider scanning and tracking all post a useless frill. The postal operators love it because it makes money for them, the people don&#039;t because it costs far more than the risk and in any case, makes no real difference to the safe arrival of packages.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i> And what gets scanned, you know will get delivered. At least with my experience to foreign countries they get the right address. </i></p><p><br /></p><p>The trouble with this argument is that you have no&nbsp; way of knowing if it made any difference. I can equally well and fairly say that the 40.000 ebay items I sent out with no&nbsp; tracking on anything also got delivered. I agree that getting the right address is pretty important.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>You&#039;re going to hear horror stories, packages going to and from the US and it&#039;s rightfully so. Our postal system&#039;s quality has gone down unbelievably. Even though we&#039;re still the best in the world, at least in my opinion.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>The problem with import to the US seems to&nbsp; be not a USPS problem but a DHS imposed restriction problem. At&nbsp; one stage a couple of years ago European post offices were simply not accepting any packages to USA.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>&nbsp; Now on the other hand the foreign countries, you&#039;re seeing a trend in Germany, France, Sweden and many others that will not send to the US at all. They only will send within Europe. It doesn&#039;t matter, even if you&#039;re willing to pay Express cost, they will not send out of Europe.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>Natural effect of the very slow clearance and long mail holdup currently effecting world to US mail. Since the delays do not seem to be caused by the postal services, paying more money to them for premium service does not really make any difference. Only courier services like FedEx can skirt the log-jam.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Remember, if you&#039;re getting paid by paypal, after a certain dollar amount you need signature confirmation. That&#039;s why with anything I sell over $500 abroad I will only take cash or Western Union.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>Sensible, but it&#039;s probably cheaper and more customer friendly to simply insure the package with a transit insurer. Obviously these are not ebay sales for cash or WU Instant Transfer.</p><p><br /></p><p>The sum now, for Paypal, is $750.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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