Comment by jbotz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbotz | Hacker News Reader

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In relation to the first part of the essay, how smoothly Amazon handles customs, that's not my experience in Brazil. Specifically, Amazon makes one rather large error, they include the shipping costs in the declared customs value, so you end up paying import duties and sales tax on the combined product + shipping, which is just plain wrong. Recently for example I bought a product valued at US$35 and shipping charges were US$25, but I ended up paying duties and sales tax on US$60 instead of US$35. Amazon pre-charged me those duties and tax, and since they declared the package as having a value of US$60 the Brazilian customs happily charged them that amount, so no refund for me.

I've written to cs@amazon.com about it a couple of times and not gotten any reply whatsoever.

Having been personally unable to justify the astronomical price of buying a replacement laptop while in Brazil, I assume Amazon is complying with tax policies:

“Import costs include the Import Duty (II), the Merchandise and Service Circulation tax (ICMS) and the Brazilian Federal Value-Added Tax on Manufactured Products (IPI). Import duty is a federal product-specific tax levied on a CIF (Cost, Insurance, and Freight) basis. Rates usually vary between 10% and 35%. The IPI is a tax levied on finished products (whether foreign or domestic), resulting from some sort of industrial process. The IPI is not considered a cost for the importer, since the value is credited back to the importer. IPI rates range between 0% and 15%. The ICMS is the VAT levied by states and applies to the legal, physical, or economic circulation of goods, whether imported or not, the services of transportation and telecommunications.”

https://santandertrade.com/en/portal/international-shipments...

I don't know about Brazil but that's how the rules work in the UK, because otherwise everyone would charge $1 for the item cost and $itemPrice+25 for shipping, and no custom tax would be paid.

In my country, customs is charged on CIF - Cost, Insurance, Freight, so that's probably the correct treatment. Not sure if that's the case in Brazil.

fyi, by law, shipping is included on tax calculations.

source: brazilian, talked to people that know more about this than i do.

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