Exhorbitant Royal Mail fee for collecting duty on goods from overseas

Roger Mills · 2008-05-14T15:14:34+00:00

My wife recently ordered an item of clothing from New Zealand, and expected to have to pay customs duty and/or VAT on it. It arrived today (when we were out) and a card was left saying that in order to receive it she would have to pay duty of about 9 (fair enough) *PLUS* a Royal Mail handling fee of 8 - making over 17 in all. How can they possibly justify a fee of 8? If postage is underpaid - meaning that someone's slipped up - there is a fee of 1. But in this case, no-one has done anything wrong - it's just the standard way of paying duty COD when buying overseas goods. We've received other things from overseas in the past - delivered by other couriers - and they've just passed on the basic duty charge - so what's with this 8 fee from Royal Mail? My wife has tried to complain, but has received a right royal run-around. Royal Mail claimed that the fee had been approved by Postcomm (or whatever the regulator is called) and Postcomm claimed it hadn't, and said they'd had lots of complaints. The bloke at the collection office even claimed that they were simply passing on a fee imposed by Customs & Excise despite the Royal Mail website clearly describing it as a "Royal Mail handling fee". Has anyone else suffered from this, and found an effective way of complaining or - better still - found a way of circumventing this exhorbitant fee?

May 14, 2008 21 Replies

Rate this thread:

Ronald Raygun 18 years ago

I don't assume that at all. I simply assume that the person is traceable.

Because what started this whole discussion off is the fact that the fee is *not* small.

Vote

Ronald Raygun 18 years ago

They would do it in batches, not singly. If physically mailing the info they would do a whole day's batch in one envelope.

But it wouldn't take 15 minutes to process each parcel. More like 1 minute, even if copying the address by hand. More like 10 seconds with the right technology.

Vote

Join the Discussion

Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.

Didn't find your answer?

Ask the community — no account required