US Customs Export Control Says: I’m Screwed
bigmessowires.com
bigmessowires.com
Add a proper ECCN number (such as "EAR99" [1]), according the rules and regulations that apply to the specific product you're shipping.
FYI, export violations can reach up to $1 million per violation, prison for up to 20 years, and administrative penalties.
[0] https://www.shippingsolutions.com/blog/six-basic-steps-for-e...
[1] EAR99 is not a free pass: https://www.shippingsolutions.com/blog/ear99-isnt-a-free-pas...
Regarding the ECCN information: it’s my understanding that by writing NOEEI 30.37(a) on the label in the box for AES/ITN/Exemption, I’m stating that the items don’t require an export license or permit and are valued under $2500, so no commercial invoice or ECCN numbers should be required. In other words, I think what I have included on the form should be OK as-is.
That's wrong. The classification of each exported item has to be declared by the sender. Exemptions should also be declared as an ECCN number (there are various ECCN numbers designed exactly for that).
Without ECCN the sender fails basic Export Compliance checks.
I understand how technically that’s true. Still, I can see how for a non-technical person a PCB with OLED display and buttons does not look like a memory module. 99.99% of memory modules sold are DIMM or M2 SSD modules. They look very differently from the content of the package.
I would try printing slightly more descriptive labels on these packages. Maybe “Custom aftermarket replacement part for 1979-1983 Macintosh computers”
Compare that to the eBay Global Shipping Program - where if eBay decides that your package violates some opaque rule, neither the sender nor the recipient receives the package. eBay keeps it.
https://pages.ebay.com/shipping/globalshipping/buyer-tnc.htm...
Basically their interest in people continuing to use the service is the only reason they have to perform, the contract says something to the effect of: ha ha we can do nothing if we want.
Transfer of Title. Title to a GSP Item remains with your Seller until such time as the GSP Item is successfully delivered to you or your consignee, at which time title to the GSP Item shall transfer to you or your consignee. At no time do eBay (or its affiliates), Pitney Bowes (or its affiliates), or the third party logistics providers, shipping carriers, customs brokers, freight forwarders, or other subcontractors under contract with Pitney Bowes take title to a GSP Item.
Maybe you really needed the bike on the agreed-upon date.
Unless you’ve agreed to allow eBay to dispose of “unacceptable” parcels at eBay’s discretion.
That sort of sounds like selling something to eBay with extra steps. (Although obviously they should just return it, although they will probably charge return shipping.)
I don't know the current state of GSP but a few years back it seemed like it was just a scam betting on customs not inspecting ~99 % of packages. GSP claimed to collect duties and import taxes (calculated... how exactly? It's not like an American seller is providing a TARIC code to eBay). Anyway, if the package eventually arrived, you'd notice that there was zero documentation attached apart from the usual sticker saying that customs didn't randomly pick this package to check. Some people reported that when customs randomly picked their fees-supposedly-paid-through-GSP-package, they had to pay duties and taxes a second time.
Yes they have. They’ve decided that transferring the expense of protecting their own reputation to their sellers is a winning business practice.
Eventually gave up and bought from Amazon.com (was cheaper than .ca).
If the customs inspector has enough domain knowledge to know what a "computer memory module" looks like, and sees one of these:
https://www.bigmessowires.com/shop/product/floppy-emu-model-...
They are likely to say "this person is trying to ship a 'not-memory-module'. Goodbye, Mr. Bond!"
The author, as others are pointing out, should hire a customs broker. This is a licensed professional who knows the process (and often the specific employees at the customs office) and can get answers to questions that can't be answered in stickers on packages.
Or, if there's really a law enforcement angle here, they should call a lawyer.
But HN isn't going to provide much help.
* plastic carrying case
* computer memory module
Edit: also, your local Postmaster.
https://help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-1145?language=en_US
Interestingly it seems to be the fault of the Census Bureau wanting to provide aggregate economic activity reports rather than border patrol themselves. Nothing more fun than watching two departments try to "cooperate" which is why you're probably not getting much help from Customs.
First, the customer/recipient can use a freight forwarding service to get the stuff shipped to them without the seller having to consider export procedure at all; The customer just has the seller ship to their US freight forwarding address and then the service handles export and reshipment. Freight forwarding services are a natural accumulator of export protocol know-how. It’s their specialization.
Secondly, the freight forwarder might be able to advise on best practices. It might be in their interest to raise attention to themselves and accumulate good will, as well as to demonstrate what particular suffering it is that they alleviate.
There’s also a free business idea here: Freight forwarding services that handle from-one -to-many shipping. (Most of those that I am familiar are from-many-to-one. From many shippers to my personal account.)
An example of one: https://www.goessa.com/packaging
Perhaps some software change happened internally that no longer defaults to something, or the clerk isn’t allowed to deduce the ECCN anymore.
Customs are one of the most harmful things for society in our day and age. People in highly developed countries don't notice this much. Still, people from poorer countries with high bureaucracy and intervention in trade by customs cannot access good and cheaper stuff from elsewhere. In the end, a few official importers/exporters with good relations with the state apparatus plus corrupt customs agents benefit at the cost of the impoverished society.
I'm happy our customs is making it harder for people to import all kinds of illegal and/or dangerous goods, like weapons and assorted chemicals pretending to be medicine or drugs, into our country.
You consume way more than you produce. Don't fall for this trap. Otherwise, next thing you'll stop doing business with anyone else because it's better to live by your own means.
If you make a product X and someone imports product X from a country where labour is 1/10th of the price, you go bust. In a lot of cases countries impose customs duties to protect those businesses, because it's better to have a working industry than cheap goods.
Which part exactly is a lie?
One recent example in the US: a lot of small local business were suffering because the Chinese government was heavily subsidizing shipments to the US. So much so that it was cheaper in some places to get a product mailed from China than from across the street. The US started pushing back with tariffs while appealing too the universal postal union postal union. That kept the US businesses from going under while the UPU slowly went through the process of forcing china to follow their rules.
And that's ignoring pollution, all the negatives that happen for the whole population when an industry and/or small businesses collapse within a country, and other negative externalities
I was born in Brazil and lived there for most of my life. When I was young, it was, in practical terms, forbidden to import computers and cars to the country to protect the "nascent" national industry. I know very well from a close point of view how tariffs can make everyone's lives miserable.
My father had to import his first computers illegally. Knock-offs IBM PCs bought in Paraguay. Imagine in the early 80s to travel from NY to San Francisco to smuggle computers over the border because a mad man in the state decided you cannot trade goods with someone who lives far away. This is what customs is about.
Protectionism is not only dumb, it's vile! Pure evil!
Here in Norway you're allowed to import certain cheeses that are also produced locally, but you'll have to pay a 300% or so duty on them. So it's strongly discouraged but not banned. Similar for other food stuff.
And as I mentioned in another comment, there's quotas given for a lot of these food items, that exempts duty for a certain amount of imported goods. This way the government can give strong protection for the amount produced locally, while meeting consumer demand via imports. I feel this is a good compromise.
Textiles is another example which have a 12% duty, a relatively minor protection. And that's about the extent of our protectionism.
As in....do you not recognize that society might want to value having functional industries and employment above absolute freedom for businesses? And as someone else already pointed out - there are whole bunch of externalities that we all pay for by allowing this unfettered and unlimited trade. With your approach if it was cheaper to ship fresh salad 20k miles than buy local, it should be allowed because after all, why should you interfere with local businesses? Sometimes it is a matter of national security too, where one country knowingly attempts to destroy another's industry by dumping their product at cost prices - great for consumers I imagine you'd say. But again, you are being very short sighted.
henvic, you won't convince the dimwits here, I assure you.
We have import duties on beef, with quotas given throughout the year based on how large local production is versus how much local demand is. Tell me how this is not done to protect local meat producers.
I could list many more such examples from the agricultural sector.
This doesn't protect businesses who want to sell apple and beef based products for less money using foreign raw inputs.
And what retaliation are you getting in exchange for raising these tariffs?
That's an incredibly weird way of looking at it. Consumers don't have some god given right to cheap apples and beef. The government has a duty to protect both consumers and producers, because it's so closely interlinked - if you destroy your own industry to import cheap beef and apples what will you do if those foreign companies decide not to sell to you any more? Or if you can't import from them because there was a draught or a disease outbreak?
Like, you think that the only think we should optimize for, ever, is the final price for the customer, everything else is not important, right? After all doing anything else is "punishing" customers for the "crime" of wanting cheap produce?
Like, please take no offence, but that's incredibly short sighted.
Some reasons:
- Someone mentioned price elasticity below. The demand for the product might actually drop because of higher prices from local producers
- Local producers become less competitive, especially if the imported item was not cheaper because of lower labor cost but because of innovation
- The downstream high-value supply chain becomes less competitive if tariffs are applied to an intermediate/low-value product
There is a narrow space in which tariffs might work and that is when they’re temporarily used to shelter local producers from outside competition with the hope that they can quickly build capability and scale of their global peers.
Including the periods you can't import required/essential goods for various reasons and local production no longer exists due to previous cheap imports?
That statement literally makes no sense whatsoever. No offence. Tariffs are paid by the importing entities, so the idea is to make it more expensive to import foreign goods than locally produced ones.
I am aware that some countries like the US use tariffs punitively but that's like using a hammer to make an omelette.
Seems those entities would likely raise prices to cover increased tariffs.
for instance, if there is a local alternative that's 10% more expensive, you might have that 10% leeway available to you to increase prices, but not if demand drops sharply (negative price elasticity) because substitutes exist or the good isn't as essential as it seemed.
Notably, not to protect businesses in general - if your business is importing/retailing exclusively foreign goods, then tariffs are explicitly designed to disadvantage you versus someone retailing local products.
What's much more important is they have good industrial policy, export discipline, and that unreasonably good deal with the UPU that lets them send mail to the US for cheaper than we can send it inside the country.
That is in direct contrast to what economists have been suggesting to us (aka the decision of China to restrict multinational corps to deploy their high tech would limit their growth)
Note that Yandex and VK exist in Russia without having to ban all competition.
The solution to me lies somewhere in between. I don’t understand why in the US we decided that using our youth to part time flip burgers and serve at restaurants is a better investment to our economy compared to having factories that make widgets, even if they are more expensive than Chinese widgets.
The specific reason is we had a run of bad economics for a few decades where we pretended industrial policy didn't exist, and we didn't read How Asia Works.
The restaurant just pays salaries to 100 people (with no specialized skills) and rent to the local real estate market (raw material and maintenance costs are very low).
On the other hand a plant would need to have trained manufacturing engineers, safety engineers, economists, quality control, managers, sales, technicians, and they would support a big part of the local economy (IT, welders, machinists, logistics companies etc).
A plant typically also has less personnel turnover, exactly because specialized labor is more scarce. That means that they have the incentive to provide full time jobs with good benefits to significant fraction of their workers.
Its a self serving idea pushed by people who benefit massively.
It's difficult for me to see how this works for the farmers and textile manufacturers. Underdeveloped economies by definition don't have much advanced industry. If you wipe out local producers of necessities you have virtually nothing left and no base to build on to develop advanced industry.
I'm also not really sure this has turned out well for advanced countries like the US, but it definitely does make part of the country richer.
I'm leery of any argument that claims that any given economic policy is an unmitigated good with no contingencies or tradeoffs.
Do you really think that wiping out employment for a third of the population would improve the economy? It takes money to make money.
the econ 101 idea that tariffs are always bad (something that invariably comes up in these kinds of discussions) is only true in perfectly spherical, frictionless worlds populated by instantaneously rational actors. tariffs actually can work in the real world (to develop a fledgling industry, for example), but it can't be a one-off holy-grail policy, but rather part of a holistic, coordinated program.
This person should be able to get an explanation as to why their shipments were declined by customs. It's absurd that they have seemingly unquestionable authority from the general public. I supposed you could take them to court and figure it out, but in most cases, I doubt that's a viable route.
As a Canadian, I can see why so few Americans want to ship internationally. Which is a negative economically.
Edit: forgot to mention that it also works great for using a USB mouse or keyboard on older Macs.
"I notice your ‘Signature’ is a printed string."
First thing that jumped out at me too when I read that label. I wonder if that's the reason. As far as I know, an actual signature is required there.
It _must_ be signed by hand and I‘m pretty confident that the packages were rejected because of that.
If they aren’t rejected by USPS, they _will_ be rejected by German customs.
No they won't be, I've sent many packages to Germany using these types of "signatures" with zero issues. This in fact how every pre-printed USPS international label looks like (ie: Etsy, Pirate Ship, etc, etc.). Please don't make absolute statements about things you don't have first hand experience with.
It might take a few bounces but typically they get an answer and is able to sort it out.
Customs hates postal imports/exports because they have to deal with low values, low-reimbursement and end-users that may not be, ahem, diplomatic when either side makes an error/fails to comprehend an incomprehensible set of regulations. And the usual treatment of individual end-users with ambiguous resentment like this case.
If everyone switched all imports/exports to Fedex/UPS/etc and customs only had to deal with brokers, they'd both be much much happier. Customs can just sit in an office receiving digitized info from the couriers and decide what they want to inspect/review instead of sifting by hand.
Mostly, customs just ignores the postal stream and lets things slide through without 100% correct paperwork, but I'm sure Fedex/UPS regularly lobbies against this laissez-faire approach.
Either way, the lack of transparency is a huge problem. I thought the United States had all those guns to prevent the State from messing with them? Not sure that seems to have helped here.
Good luck figuring this out! Go to the news media.
I know this because the tracking information a USPS clerk looked up for me showed the delivery person marking the package as delivered while being nowhere near the delivery address. In fact, nowhere near an address at all. It was marked as delivered to a street-intersection which houses a vacant field.
The USPS clerk acknowledged this, but said that because there were no other complaints about the delivery person that day, there was nothing they could do.
So it seems like USPS delivery people are literally allowed to steal one item of mail a day.
Parent agency: United States Postal Service
You just count your losses if you can't figure it out and accept it + move on.
If you throw too big a fit things can often wind up being made worse for you, out of you being an inconvenience.
Compared to a lot of other places to live, I'm not complaining though.