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Comment by buserror | Hacker News Reader

Here in the uk the mailers have a fancy method for making up the difference in pricing, they call it 'handling fee'.

So you pay postage from your parcel in country X, and on arrival in the UK, it's held, sometime for customs and/or VAT -- and then the carrier tries to charge you up to £20 for 'handling fee' to deliver it to you.

Basically what they do is try to hold you hostage to pay for the delivery, even tho you have paid postage already AND they are supposed to have an agreement with the oversea mailers about it.

It's really daylight robbery. And they all do it. Royal Mail, DHL, Fedex etc.

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This is done in Canada as well. It's frustrating when I've already paid $80 for shipping. What the hell is a handling fee, you crooks.

Can you contact the sender and tell them to sort it out? They are the courier's customer so really it's their problem to resolve. Just say "I never received my parcel" and let them figure it out.

I get those messages too. There are three options:

1. Pay the courier company to take care of customs.

2. Go to the customs office and do it yourself. I remember discussing with a customs officer what category a Soekris net4501 really was. ;)

3. Return the parcel.

The good news is that Amazon, Ebay, Aliexpress and some others deal with it now. Anyone who sells via Ebay can have the customs stuff processed by Ebay for a much more reasonable fee.

OK, so the issue is unpaid customs fees, which you can pay the courier to sort out for you. I thought they were demanding extra postage or something like that.

Say you order an USB-to-centronics adapter from China. Then the DHL/whatever courier brings it to you and says "you have to pay €1.07 VAT on that, and also a €25 handling charge to DHL for acting as a middleman between you and the customs office". That €25 stings.

The problem here is that the countries doing this actually love it because it creates another unofficial barrier of entry.

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