wiretap wrote on 2020-09-04, 14:20:
What's up with the duty fees and taxes in other countries? Is there some weird reason for price rape that high?
As mentioned above, it's basically a scam by governments that cannot pass up the opportunity of making some free money off the hard work of their citizens. The usual excuse to do this is always something like "we've got to protect internal commerce/industry!", "we have to get people to spend their money internally rather than it going somewhere else", but all of this crap makes no sense if we're talking about importing stuff that is not even produced locally nor competes with anyone else's job. But then they will claim that it's too difficult to decide which products to tax and which should be exempt, so they just tax everything. I'm not talking about VAT, but import taxes which are generally much higher.
Couriers like DHL then hop onto this bandwagon and add outrageous fees for "handling". In my country they don't even bother to charge the import taxes or deliver the package to your address (unless it's a shipment from Amazon Global), they just give you a bunch of papers so you can go to the airport and go through the customs hassle yourself. But they still charge you for delivering those papers (!!!). That's why I avoid DHL, Fedex and UPS like the plague for international shipments, and rely only on the local post or freight forwarders depending on the case, both of those do the customs paperwork and deliver the packages to my home for a much lower price.
