Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Is there a Brexit effect on deliveries from abroad?
After hearing reported horror stories, I have been anxious to understand how our changed relationship with the EU might affect the delivery of goods ordered online from overseas. Here are a few of my own experiences:
Christmas presents I ordered from Italy on 6th December were picked up in Verona on 11th and delivered (in Harefield) on 15th December and (in Ipswich and in Framlingham) on 16th. All three had travelled via Stansted. Things ordered from Paris even as late as 19th December were delivered here on 22nd, also via Stansted.
Last year through Crowd Farming, I “adopted” an orange tree near Valencia. This entitled me to four 10kg boxes of oranges. The first two were ordered to arrive on 7th December, the third to arrive on 17th January and the fourth to arrive in February. The first two arrived on 10th December after their journey by road was disturbed by the congestion around the Dover-Calais route in the run up to Brexit. The delivery date of the third box was put back to 21st because bad weather (Storm Filomena) delayed fruit picking. The box was picked up in Valencia by DHL on 18th and delivered here by ParcelForce on 21st. There were no extra charges which might have been because the goods themselves had been paid for the previous year and only the delivery service was paid for in 2021.
On 12th January I ordered some clothes from LL Bean in the USA. Their website detected that I was in UK and quoted prices inclusive of “taxes and duties” (this was their practice also last time I used them two years ago). The transaction was handled for LL Bean by a company called Borderfree. The package was shipped on 18th and delivered here on 23rd with no further formalities.
So far, so good. It would be hard to say that either of these two cases show any kind of adverse Brexit effect. I shall watch closely what happens the next time I order something from inside the EU. Especially if it is likely to come by road.
Tags for Forum Posts: brexit deliveries
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by JJ B on
-
"Voilà les effets du Bexit...."
Other than leading the world in vaccinating the population, here are the effects of taking back control and getting sovereignity back....
-
-
My husband ordered a pair of trainers costing £90 at the beginning of last week. It turns out they’d come from France & he was charged £120 for delivery by UPS.
-
-
Things we didn't see on the side of a bus:
"£350 in extra charges when shopping online"...
-
Permalink Reply by Dick Harris on
-
A further experience has been as follows:
On 16th Jan my partner ordered some glass beads from a supplier in California for a craft she pursues. They were sent using a handling company called RR Donnelley Rancho Dominguez which arranged for the package to be conveyed (possibly by handing it to an agent of the Dutch Post Office in the USA). It was dispatched on 21st Jan using the Dutch post office's standard packet service. The tracking shows that it was received in the Netherlands on 2nd Feb and in the UK on 4th Feb (still in the hands of the Dutch post office - which may have a sorting centre in the UK). On the 6th Feb it arrived at UK Customs and was released 8 hours later. The packet carried a customs declaration which said that the goods originated in the US. The package had been opened and resealed. There was a yellow sticker on the outside of the box saying in English "Goods not fulfilling the conditions laid down in Article 28 and 29 of the Treaty on the functioning of the European Union". These are the articles which define the customs union and prohibit the imposition of charges of any kind on goods moving within it - the implication being that if they had been destined for delivery within the EU, some duty might have been payable.
There was no indication of which authority had opened the box. No other remarks or charges were made and our regular postman delivered the package this morning (8th Feb). It is hard to draw firm conclusions from this as to how far Brexit is responsible for any delays in this case. If the handling company had not routed the package through the EU, it would not have been necessary to know the status of the contents relative to the EU treaty but it is not clear what, if any, delay was attributable to this.
-
-
Almost ALL our international parcels have been massively delayed since around mid December. We send small numbers of our products across the world using couriers and post. Parcels sent to Europe at the beginning of January, which would normally have taken 2-7 days to arrive are only just getting through, almost 5 weeks later. A parcel to the US had been stuck for more that 2 months in customs, and one to Dubai for 5 weeks. Parcels from Australia and China have gone into black holes . It is patchy. Some parcels to/from places other than Europe have got through OK. The courier companies were overwhelmed and didn't know what they were doing at the beginning. The treaty only relates to goods made in the UK - as ours are - but the courier companies weren't initially asking for this information or even for our EORI number or goods classification number. All essential info to determine local VAT and customs duty in Europe. We overcame this by sending all the info directly to our customer and telling the customers to feed it back to the local courier company. We are also giving all of our European customers a discount to reduce the pain for them of having to pay local VAT (they don't have to pay customs duty, but they do have to pay VAT, and the courier company's fee for arranging this.) It doesn't surprise me at all if 70% of our EU export trade has gone. We are lucky that we have a unique product - people have to buy from us. Nevertheless, our orders from other countries have dropped massively since Brexit Our orders from the US (our largest overseas market) dropped from 40% of our total sales to just 18% during January.
-
-
I can well believe what you say Anna about outgoing stuff. In December, a resident asked me to pack up some things that he had left here and send them to his wife in St Lucia where he is staying during the Covid crisis. It was a mixed bag of items: some tea, some coffee, some water filters, an electronics training kit, some chocolate digestives. Trying to get DHL to accept this online proved impossibly difficult. The system demanded a complete list of contents and a six digit commodity code for each item corresponding to its class for customs purposes. No help in finding such codes other than a reference to the HMRC website. After a lot of similar service providers, I found one (Parcel Monkey) that would allow me to fill in a customs form just like the sort of thing the Post Office accepts for small parcels going overseas and which are not being traded. It worked OK, the parcel was picked up by Parcel Force and delivered in St Lucia by Fedex. Dealing with just one was a time consuming nightmare and I swore, never again. Of course, it ought eventually to become easier for commercial companies doing such things frequently and it seems that customs authorities also have to become familiar with new procedures.
-
-
And here is another report that backs up the stories about export difficulties:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-55985956
When I lived in Brussels, a number of small shops were set up to sell such things as Cadbury's Dairy Milk, that could not be found in Belgian supermarkets. After a short while, this kind of competition did cause Marmite to appear in our local DelHaize (equivalent of Sainsbury's).
-
-
The problem is that Brexit further "complexified" a change in systems that HMRC has already put en train BEFORE the Brexit vote.....
'Revamped HMRC customs system ‘set to be ready for no-deal Brexit’
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/revamped-hmrc...
Of course some people vastly underestimated just how much the UK and the EU are bound by trade and other relations.
Then the purveyors of lies - that inlcudes our lovely Pipied Piper PM and Jester-in-Chief, BoJo - fooled some people into believing that all would be hunky dory post Brexit. Illusions of grandeur....
They just didn't realise (or want to admit) that Britannia no longer rules the waves.
-
-
And the procedures and added costs for small scale customers and shippers/sellers is so bad that even American clients who have nothing to do with Brexit, are withdrawing from doing business with the UK.
Life is just too short when there are so many competitors out there, to deal with the increased bureaucratic procedures that the UK has imposed on itself after withdrawing from an EU that it blamed for......bureaucracy!
How ironic.
A lesson learnt?
Go and tell Truss, Redwood, Farage and the like. After all you have now signed trade deals with Japan and the TPP, n'est-ce-pas? Things are looking up!
I was discussing this with a friend from a small West Indian island this weekend and they said "Oh, so now they know what it is like"!
I smiled.....
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2
- Next ›
© 2024 Created by Hugh.
Powered by
