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bunn The Shop on the Borderlands sells many things to many countries. Up till this year, our position on import duties and tariffs has been, more or less: 'if you want to buy it, we'll post it: you are best placed to look up exactly what the country you live in charges for importing the things you've chosen to buy, and the postal service or courier will sort that out for you for a small fee'. I'm sure this put some people off buying from us, but it was fairly clear to customers (we gave them warnings about it) and very easily manageable for us.
Then Mr Trump decided he was going to Tariff All the Things at extremely short notice (like less than a month!)
In an attempt to make the filthy Foreigner (ie, us) pay rather than the US citizen, he insisted that not only would there be no exceptions for small parcels, but anyone who bought stuff from outside the USA and had it posted to them, would be billed at least $80 unless the seller prepaid the tariff.
So suddenly we had to try to work out what the US tariff was going to be for everything we sold so we could charge and post appropriately. This was complicated by the fact that tariffs are not based on where the Shop is based, or where the company that designed and commissioned the product is based, but where the physical object was made. So, for example, some D&D books are printed in the USA, but some are printed in China, and some in Belgium.
And there's no way to predict where a specific book was printed, without taking it off the shelf and rummaging through it in the hope that it will have 'printed in Lithuania' written on it somewhere (Lithuania is a bit of a hotbed of RPG printing...) Some books have no indication where they were printed at all, so you have to guess. Some of our stock is 50 years old. Doesn't matter. We still have to declare where it was made.
Anyway, we did that for all the 12000ish Things in the Shop. And we gave them all international product classification codes (which is how you declare you're selling dice and not books for tax purposes, for example)
And we did it twice, because the first solution we had didn't work. (It was a quicker job the second time since the data was in and just had to be moved, but still. )
So, I tested ordering various products and they seemed to be getting what we thought was the right amount of tariff/customs fee appearing on them. Then we got a pleading email from a hopeful American, unable to find the thing they specially wanted in the USA, so we let them order - a book printed in the UK. They got charged the amount we expected by Royal Mail, 10% tariff plus 50p admin, and a week later, their book had reached them! Hurray!
So it all works now, right? IF ONLY. We got another pleading American email, so we let that guy order too, and in a surge of confidence, turned off our message saying 'sorry no orders to the USA for now.'
But. We put US Order #2 through the Royal Mail system, for three books made in Italy, and... RM charged us 50p admin fee for doing the duty for us, and nothing more. But they were printed in Italy! Italy has a 15% tariff!
So we rang Royal Mail, and said: why no tariff? And they said: Oh it's fine. Tariffs don't apply to books.
So we rang off and reinspected US Order #1, which was definitely a book, and definitely printed in the UK, and for which we were definitely billed 10% of the value for the tariff a week and a half ago. And boggled.
(I might not have got all the terminology 100% right, but I'm increasingly dubious that anyone has got this 100% right)
Update:Parcel #1 had got tangled up in the massive update project and went out with the HS code saying it was a boxed board game by accident. So I think we're OK sending books without billing tariffs for them. Or, I hope so...
Then Mr Trump decided he was going to Tariff All the Things at extremely short notice (like less than a month!)
In an attempt to make the filthy Foreigner (ie, us) pay rather than the US citizen, he insisted that not only would there be no exceptions for small parcels, but anyone who bought stuff from outside the USA and had it posted to them, would be billed at least $80 unless the seller prepaid the tariff.
So suddenly we had to try to work out what the US tariff was going to be for everything we sold so we could charge and post appropriately. This was complicated by the fact that tariffs are not based on where the Shop is based, or where the company that designed and commissioned the product is based, but where the physical object was made. So, for example, some D&D books are printed in the USA, but some are printed in China, and some in Belgium.
And there's no way to predict where a specific book was printed, without taking it off the shelf and rummaging through it in the hope that it will have 'printed in Lithuania' written on it somewhere (Lithuania is a bit of a hotbed of RPG printing...) Some books have no indication where they were printed at all, so you have to guess. Some of our stock is 50 years old. Doesn't matter. We still have to declare where it was made.
Anyway, we did that for all the 12000ish Things in the Shop. And we gave them all international product classification codes (which is how you declare you're selling dice and not books for tax purposes, for example)
And we did it twice, because the first solution we had didn't work. (It was a quicker job the second time since the data was in and just had to be moved, but still. )
So, I tested ordering various products and they seemed to be getting what we thought was the right amount of tariff/customs fee appearing on them. Then we got a pleading email from a hopeful American, unable to find the thing they specially wanted in the USA, so we let them order - a book printed in the UK. They got charged the amount we expected by Royal Mail, 10% tariff plus 50p admin, and a week later, their book had reached them! Hurray!
So it all works now, right? IF ONLY. We got another pleading American email, so we let that guy order too, and in a surge of confidence, turned off our message saying 'sorry no orders to the USA for now.'
But. We put US Order #2 through the Royal Mail system, for three books made in Italy, and... RM charged us 50p admin fee for doing the duty for us, and nothing more. But they were printed in Italy! Italy has a 15% tariff!
So we rang Royal Mail, and said: why no tariff? And they said: Oh it's fine. Tariffs don't apply to books.
So we rang off and reinspected US Order #1, which was definitely a book, and definitely printed in the UK, and for which we were definitely billed 10% of the value for the tariff a week and a half ago. And boggled.
(I might not have got all the terminology 100% right, but I'm increasingly dubious that anyone has got this 100% right)
Update:Parcel #1 had got tangled up in the massive update project and went out with the HS code saying it was a boxed board game by accident. So I think we're OK sending books without billing tariffs for them. Or, I hope so...
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Date: 2025-10-08 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-08 08:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-08 09:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-08 05:58 pm (UTC)*googles UNSPSC codes*
No, codes for duties and tariffs seem to be a whole different thing - they are referred to as HS codes, and they appear to have a whole different structure to UNSPSC codes.
If there was a nice list somewhere of what all the international tariff and VAT rates are for everything, that would be very helpful, but even that... well, if it exists, we haven't found it yet.
I think parcel #1 accidentally went out with a code saying it was a boxed board game.
The dim light on the horizon : if we can get the US tariffs right, we can hopefully use the same system to pre-pay for duties on stuff going to at least some EU countries. That would be nice. Particularly as the Belgian post office is, apparently, charging a 40 euro admin fee for collecting VAT from the customer. 40 euros!
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Date: 2025-10-08 07:43 pm (UTC)I'm still annoyed about the fact leaving the EU has meant I can no longer buy alcohol from various European websites I used to get things from. That and the fact the postage has quadrupled in some cases. Why do my favourite purveyors of quality music products and alcohol tie-ins for bands have to be based in Austria and Germany? So the 40 Euro admin fee sadly does not surprise me :(
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Date: 2025-10-12 08:37 pm (UTC)But I'm hoping we can do duty pre-paid at least to France and Germany, Royal Mail are offering that for several countries (but not Belgium, perhaps there's a theme there!)
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Date: 2025-10-09 10:21 pm (UTC)(No one is getting the tariffs right. It's the world's worst guessing game.)
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Date: 2025-10-12 08:39 pm (UTC)Fingers crossed for the third parcel. Feels a bit like roulette...
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Date: 2025-10-09 10:54 pm (UTC)I heard that that those tariffs have stumped the post offices of whole countries, even, for a bit, let alone small businesses.
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Date: 2025-10-12 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-12 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-12 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-19 08:25 am (UTC)And if you have any particular questions, I can run them past a couple of people I know for whom customs stuff is bread and butter.
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Date: 2025-10-19 11:13 am (UTC)This particular rant was triggered by the belief that after weeks spent checking HTS codes and countries of origin, Royal Mail seemed to have just randomised the amount it charged us, but in fact it turned out that I'd hamfistedly sent one item coded as a board game, not a book. So perhaps the universe is not quite so chaotic as I feared.
But I do have a related mystery that I shall pass on on the offchance you have light to shed:
Everything I've tested tariffs on using the RM PDDP system or our Customs Fees set of standard rules seems to calculate them entirely using the HTS code - ie, is it a board game, a book, or a plastic mini, or dice. That also seems to be what the US customs site https://hts.usitc.gov/ calculates (though
Given this, why were all the news stories about country of origin? A plastic mini from China seems to attract the same tariff as a plastic mini from the UK, and it's like 7.5%. So far in my testing, and checking the countries of origin appear to be only relevant if it's something made in the USA that is going home. Maybe we live in a weirdly low-tariff corner of the market?
Part of the confusion over this is that everything has changed so fast that the research we did when IOSS came out is incredibly out of date, and even the research I did in August when the US tariffs first went in is very dated, as couriers and postal services race bring out new services that may, or may not, actually work to do all the calculations for us. Aaaaa.