Comment · Fri, March 27, 2020
Question about customs
Original post in this thread
MentholFlavoring · 1 points
Hi there, I'm loving the products from NootropicsDepot but had a huge delay because it was sitting at customs. When it arrived I had to pay a clearance of 17 EUR which was strange to me. I never had to pay customs for NootropicsDepot orders before.
The customs declaration said the product had a value of 40 USD so it wouldn't be imported without paying a fee. It makes the products a lot more expensive imo and I'm wondering if you could do something about this?
I'm in the Netherlands btw
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
Both the EU and Canada recently changed their policies, and got very strict with declarations and duties for some reason. I know Canada did it because our idiot government pulled out of NAFTA, and we signed the new USMCA. Well Canada basically told us to fuck ourselves (not that I blame them) and did not sign it. So Trump is going around saying the USMCA is much better, and it was signed and a good deal for us. However, he did not mention the fact that Canada has refused to sign it. So it is NOT in effect. That means NAFTA is gone, and the replacement is not in effect. So Canada started going a bit crazy with customs clearance.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/economy/usmca-ratification-delayed-in-canada
Around that same time, the EU started doing a similar thing. I believe this was in response to the threats from the White House on a trade war with the EU.
So because of all this, we had to change the way we were listing things on the customs declarations. We are not changing the values. Those are the same, as you saw on your form. However, now we are itemizing each item separately with their product name. So in theory, you should not have to pay duties on that shipment because it is below the tax de minimus for the Netherlands. However, the EU is being strange right now for some reason, and we don't know why.
Can you PM me details of what your customs requested of you, and send me pictures? I would like to get to the bottom of what in the hell they are doing, because while Canada makes sense for things being different, the EU rules are still in place as far as I can tell. The current de minimus in the Netherlands is 150 Euro. So that should be what they are following.