At least Canada to Poland they charge you a flat fee for handling the customs in the first place, so if you’re buying, buy more in a single shipment

So you imported hockey sticks and are confused as to the duty?

International shipments will be subject to duties and taxes. The seller does not need to notify you of these, this is just the cost of directly importing products from another country.

Not sure how it is in the US. But here in the UK there’s two ways a business can export.

1: They pre-clear the customs duty and include it in the sales total (so it’s like paying sales tax at the checkout, except it’s the pre-cleared duty fees). Then the parcel has a nice duty paid stamp and goes straight through customs (I guess unless customs are suspicious and check into it).

2: They just charge you the item price with no tax applied. In which case you need to pay local tax and duties applicable once the product arrives. Here it’s a bit different. They will hold it at the local depot and you can either go there and pay + collect, or you can pay online and it will be rescheduled for delivery once you pay.

As others have said, it’s not a scam. There’s no requirement for a business to do option 1, and it’s likely only viable for large businesses to register and have someone/software that knows the various duties required for various countries.

I’ve ordered from newegg and B&M in the past for example, and in both cases the items were pre-cleared and arrived promptly without any hassle.

Maybe there’s something similar for imports into the US too?

UPS commonly scams people with duty-related fees.

The most common scam is that there might be a 5$ duty owed on the package so they pay that, then throw on a 30$ convenience fee and a 5$ payment surcharge etc…

It’s always technically possible to dodge these fees if you’re willing to go through crazy hoops (i.e. sometimes you can pre-register that duty will be owed and arrange the duty payment to come directly from you - sometimes you need to actually go to the port to collect the package).

In most cases I’ve seen they sneak language into your receipt signature that might prevent you from contesting the duty after receiving the package but they can also asd on surcharges if they need to redeliver or reschedule a package.

… TL;DR it’s a fucking bullshit charge that you may be able to get out of if you’re willing to fight it but they purposefully bullshit bill you an amount small enough that it’s fucking annoying but not “This is worth a day of small claims court bullshit to fight” amount.

I’ve never seen someone who doggedly protested those charges fail to get them reversed but most people give up (including me usually - I fought it once when they tried to slap 140CAD bullshit fees on a package worth 15CAD with a duty fee of 5 cents. That one I fucking fought and threatened to just refuse receipt of.

This is funny, because as a Canadian, we experience this on everything above $100 that we order from the US. Either find a Canadian supplier or get ready to pay hundreds in duties. I just paid over $100 to ship a $200 package that’s arriving today.

I had this problem recently. I’m not in the US. I bought something from H&M online and I got an email from UPS that I would need to pay duties on it.

I was a little surprised as I loaded the countries version of the site and they have tons of stores locally.

It sucks and I felt a little scammed to be honest.

Well, what do the duty declaration and duty tracking sticker say?

At least over here there ought to be one that tells you what the seller declared the goods and their value as, and another that tells you either the specifics of the duty fee calculated, or one with a large (over here) letter+number combination that tells you which standard category this falls under (usually for duty free packages).

50 on 300 is is ~17%, so that’s a pretty normal duty depending on the goods and which country they originate from.

I once won a promotion and I was sent some items for free. When I went to pick them up, I had to pay more than I would have been willing to pay if I bought the items, because of ‘duties and taxes’.

I probably should have just refused the delivery, but I was young and didn’t know any better so I paid for my package. There was a receipt inside the box that listed the items as being somewhat expensive, so I assumed there was some weird accounting where I still had to pay the taxes despite getting them for free.

I’ve bought and shipped a lot of items since then without ever having to pay upon pickup.

If they were made in China and imported via Canada you would still have to pay tariffs on them, but just guessing there

skates are, iirc, the only piece of ice hockey equipment that might cost extra on import.

was the item coded right?
9506.99.25.40/hockey stick

I’ll look into it. I wouldn’t have paid, but my wife answered the door. COD seems like a scam that ended in the 90’s.