Play.com & Customs Charges

kencleary

Hey all,

I just got something odd in the post that I've never recieved in several years and several hundred orders from Play.com. It's a letter from the Revenue Commissioners saying they're holding a package for me from play.com and won't release it until I send them €9.76 in VAT and a €5 handling charge. :mad:

I expect it's season 3 of the Wire found here: http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/CART/3-/1015255/-/Product.html?cur=258

Has anyone else experienced this lately? I was under the impression that one of the benefits of using play is that we didn't have to pay customs on anything that was bought from them.

It throws up all sorts of problems for me since I often buy games and DVD boxsets from play and if they're going to be adding these charges on to every item it's make play.com as expensive as HMV, nevermind the delays it'll cause to deliverys!

Fanboy

I'm waiting on season 2 of lost since 6th feb....perhaps this is where its held up. Filled out the 'lost' (no pun intended) form on website and they've sent another.

Where do play post their stuff from?

kencleary

Jersey - i.e. the Channel Islands.

Beruthiel

I order from Play.com all the time, have never received a letter such as you.
I was not aware of any issues with regards to VAT

ixoy

I got stung by an Amazon.com parcel awhile back but I had to get it from 'An Post' - I got no letter from Revenue.

I also never got another parcel from Amazon and I also never recevied the second one they sent out. I'm wondering if it was intercepted too and I was never told - has this happened to anyone else? How would I know if it was taken?

Oh and are Play.com packages ever intercepted in the UK? Surely the same deal applies there and they have to pay VAT too (albeit at a lower rate)? And, by the same token, are they charged VAT on their packages on Amazon.co.uk when they get to paying, like we are?

RobertFoster

According to some of the threads before Christmas on the subject (it all kicked off then), Play.com have an agreement between themselves and the UK government, but not with ours.

Apparently customs have a limit of €22 on imports, though this figure changes depending on who you believe. There was a crackdown at Christmas and it seemed to drop off early this year. A few packages are still getting caught however it seems.

milltown

When I started using Play they weren't the quickest to deliver, often over a week when everywhere else was 2-3 days. Lately this seems to have stretched to multiples of weeks but I haven't yet got a demand for duty/vat. Once in the past few months, a package just never arrived (over a month) so Play kindly sent another, which arrived in just under two weeks.

I have two, entirely unsubstantiated, suspicions.

1. DVD/game packaging is pretty easy to spot, and if it has Play.com on the address label too, it makes for a pretty soft target for the lighter fingered mail handler. Odds are high that it will be a recently released movie or upwards of €50 worth of a game. Either way, fairly handy to shift down the pub.

2. With the volume of relatively low value internet shopping coming through the post I can't see it being economical for Customs to pursue payment of duty and vat on everything. I think they launch a two pronged attack. Anything they do decide to process they add a large premium to the demand, effectively punishing you for shopping outside the EU rather than just charging the taxes due in a fair and legitimate way.
I offer the example of Yesmoke, who many smokers will remember sold duty free cigarettes online at healthy (sic) savings to Irish customers. Once Customs targetted their shipments the tax demands started coming. On one package containing 40 cigarettes I received a demand for duty and vat of more than the price of 40 cigarettes in an irish shop. Unless Gallaghers et al are wholesaling their products at a loss in Ireland, I feel customs were trying to rip people off. I never got a reply to requests of how the figure was arrived at.
Otherwise they just delay everything. People might be prepared to wait a few days extra to save a few euro but there's a limit to how long they'll wait. If customs delay everything for a few weeks more, people will get sick of waiting and either order from within the EU or, god forbid, actually go down to the shops and buy what they want. Either way, the problem solves itself and Customs' workload reduces. Another tactic used on Yesmoke. It became impossible to tell when or if my lovely fags would be arriving. I might get 40 every other week but the rest of my 20 a day were bought in the shops. Customs wore me down and I gave up ordering online.