It really sucks living in America these days. Ordered a bunch of reform parts late last year and they finally shipped through my absolute least favorite shipper UPS (I swear past orders came through DHL). Of course now they are asking for a 232 metal import form which obviously as a consumer I have no idea what to do with.
Reaching out to support but anyone else had to deal with this?
Edit: Reached out to support says main front desk person is on vacation until July 15th, but UPS wants confirmation in 5 days.
I dealt with something very similar and eventually got my parts without problems, by paying extra fees on delivery (about $87) to UPS. In my case, once the package reached the USA, UPS held it before customs and claimed:
Shipment may contain a commodity that is subject to antidumping / countervailing duty, and further evaluation is needed to determine if AD/CVD duty applies.
I was instructed to fill out a form explaining why the SSD I ordered was not subject to these duties, with a deadline of 10 business days. I was in contact with MNT support and they tried to help me figure out who made the SSDs in the shipment, which seemed necessary for the forms.
During the next 10 business days I called and emailed UPS many times. I got several mutually inconsistent responses about how to complete the anti-dumping forms. Because my time is severely limited by my terrible job, I gave up and decided to not bother filling out the forms and see if I still got my order.
After the deadline passed, I got an email from UPS saying “Payment Due On Delivery” with a link to pay import fees by credit card. On an order invoiced for €2,332.50, I paid $87 in these fees.
The UPS support workers clearly had no idea how I was supposed to respond to their requests for additional customs documentation. This suggests that UPS is collecting and pocketing bogus customs fees. In some sense, that’s good news: whatever fee they make up once a recipient (by design) fails to produce adequate documentation should be relatively affordable compared to the declared value of the package, to avoid triggering more detailed audits or a serious legal case.
I have a couple more packages on order from MNT and expect to go through the same process next time, with similarly affordable (but legally dubious) fees paid on delivery after I fail to complete the import documentation. Budgeting a probabilistic amount of money to be absorbed by corporate grift every month is just a feature of living in the USA, I guess.
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Thats good to hear, they bombarded me with half a dozen emails and texts yesterday and I clicked on a button to have a UPS customs person call me but they never did. Today when I check the UPS link it seems like they figured it out. Guess we’ll see in a couple days what happens.
Last time I got something from Canada from UPS is was a $60 item that I had to pay $6 for the dubious tariffs and around $20 for some nonsense UPS processing fee and checking online it seems that UPS processing fee scales with the price of the items. After that I swore off UPS if at all possible.
Update: Ended up being $30 in tariffs which is gross but whatever, and $90 in UPS brokerage fees which feels downright criminal. Maybe in the future MNT can work with a prebroker to avoid that. I’d rather pay a little more in upfront shipping than an arm and a leg to UPS to stamp some papers. I can at least potentially get tariffs back. I’ll never see the brokerage fees outside of class action lawsuit.