I thought up until now i was doing rather well with importing goods from outside the EU. I haven't bumped into and scam suppliers, or had horror stores about losing tons of money or had problems with shipping, customs or taxes.
Now i go for a big order and i'm having problems.
For just over a year now i have ben importing in an item that sells really well on ebay on which i make about 200% profit....great....
I've been only ordering and importing 50 at a time....place an order every 3 weeks or so. Fantastic....During January i decided since business was booming i'd order 200 of the items to save on shipping costs and really start marketing these items well.
So i placed the order for 200 with my normal supplier and within 1 week items were ready to send out. Items sent out on 25th Jan using Fedex. This was to be the staart of my problems. Up until now my supplier had used TNT Express to send items to me for which i belive their port of entry is Gatwick. Fedex port of Entry is Stansted. It's been almost a month now and my items have not arrived because Customs at Stansted belive the goods are illegal to sell in the UK. Customs at Stansted have held pack on my package and yet i never had any problems with clearing these packages at Gatwick when they were checked. Now that they have been seized they are being sent to Trading Standards to test out and confirm the legality of the item. I have been advised by customs that the regulations are different for private importation and commercial importation. I have imported these under my personal name just like before and this seems to be a problem.
This is a first for me in that i have never had problems with customs. Has anyone else been in a position where the goods have been seized and been able to succesfully recover the items back from customs. If i'm not succesful what happens to the goods...do they get sent back to the originator or destroyed. If they get destroyed then i'm about to loose a hell of a lot of money (what is a lot of money for me anyway).
Can anyone provide any advise, tips, tricks to help me out here.
Hi I can understand why you dont want to say what the item is but its going to be hard for people to help without knowing what it is your trying to import
Prove they are not illegal to sell here, customs are a bit dim sometimes and classify products into wrong categories. if you cant prove it then you wont get it back
The question is why customs feel these can not be sold in UK?, if the proucts are copies of a brand name you would loose them, and they would be smached in bits.
If they are not copies, you need to show proof to the customs, also now we have patent laws and if the supplier sold items that are under these laws ut don't pay the fees, you are in trouble.
If they are being held by customs they will write to you and explain why. You will then have to provide any documentation they may ask for before they release it.
Until you hear from customs, you can not do anything unfortunately.
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March 2010
