Duty payable on online clothes purchases from usa.

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maelduin123

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Can anyone tell me what duty is payable on online purchases of clothes from USA? My son wishes to order some items from the abercrombie website. I am afraid I will get hit with a large bill for duty when they arrive!
 
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]There should be two charges.

1) Customs Duty. - Customs duty is calculated by Customs on the TOTAL cost of the clothing. They add together the purchase price, + any insurance, + freight costs. On this total figure they charge Customs duties of 12%.

2) V.A.T. - After adding the customs duty to the total cost of the clothing, they then add V.A.T.@ 21% on the after Customs duty figure..[/FONT]
 
courier will often also collect the tax before they release the goods
 
I have shopped on line and NEVER had to pay duty on my purchase, Although it was within the EU so I dont know if the same applies outside the EU
 
I ordered clothes from them in the past for my brother. The clothing prices were cheaper than similar items in Ireland but I got customs, VAT and Fedex charges so they worked out very expensive in the end. If you know someone going to America, you'd be much better off asking them to buy direct.
 
i would agree with purpeller i bought clothing from abercrombie, and i got a fed-ex bill for duty payable which also included some fed-ex admin charges etc,it worked out very expensive!
wouldnt do it again
 
'Bought quite a bit of stuff from Landsend & got caught once or twice with duty.It seems you could be lucky/unlucky.
 
You can shop and ship easier if you have someone with a US address who could ship them to you?
 
I've been trying to decipher the large bill that has just arrived from Fedex for some clothes that arrived in June (Fedex bill just arrived today). The duty seemed very high but when I waded through the very user-unfriendly customs and excise pages to find out the correct rates, it seems that there is a duty rate of 27% applied to clothing imported from the US (12% standard + 15% US-specific); VAT is then applied to the base+duty figure. Is the 27% figure correct? It seems very high - I always thought VAT was way more than duties.

To give the numbers (which I think are correct if I have read the C+E website correctly) as a warning to anyone thinking they are getting cheap clothing:

US $ price = 293.92
Shipping = 39.00
Total US $ = 332.92

Convert at June C+E exchange rate of 1.349, total € value = 246.79

27% duty = 66.63

Total € value after duty = 313.42

VAT at 21% on 313.42 = 65.82

Total VAT + duty = 66.63 + 65.82 = 132.45 or 54% of the original price!

Fedex also charged 7.20 which seems highish for what should be an automated process for them but doesnt seem too extortionate.
 
We've ordered clothes a few times from them and have only been hit once for taxes. The only time that we got hit was when the order was quite large over €300 (a few friends lumped their order in with our) and was a very big package. All other times we managed to get away with it. Happy days!!
 
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