This is one of many problems with manufacturing products in the western world. Not only is shipping usually much cheaper ~than~ from China (and you have to get the parts from east Asia anyway, most of the time), you also need to deal with a whole host of certifications, export restrictions and generally convoluted bureaucracy. It sometimes seems that the rules are designed to scare off hardware (and other) startups. Basing yourself in China you can manufacture cheaper, sidestep most of these issues and basically chuck uncertified products with shoddy and falsely filled customs labels at customers everywhere. If we actually want electronics manufacturing to come back, we'll have to sort those problems out, small enterprises matter too, not just the ones wealthy enough to have this sorted out by sheer brute force.
Yeah, this looks way more compliant than any package I've ever received from China. Most of those don't even have the appropriate HS tariff numbers on at all...
I'd argue that it isn't really much less regulated on the China export side. There are still a mess of forms and certifications you have to get in order to export. The only difference is that your manufacturer and origin agent usually handle all this stuff for you.
This is what the author puts in the comments on their site:
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.
Surely.........they reimburse both sides for it? Otherwise that's just theft or at the absolute minimum fraud. Ebay is absolutely free to reject any packages for any reason whatsoever, but they should always return them.
Even with reimbursement, it is still theft. It's like if I buy a bike from you, and the delivery truck driver decides to keep the bike for themselves and instead gives me cash and drives off, with me having no say in this.
Well.........kinda, but he's not stealing from you, he's stealing from the delivery company at that point. The delivery company accepts responsibility for the parcel when they collect it, and the contract usually says that either they will deliver the parcel or pay you back X where X is agreed beforehand. So if either of those two things happen they successfully complete their part of the contract. If the driver takes your parcel then it's up to the delivery company to prosecute, not you.
You still own the bike, he is stealing from you. You could argue that depending on the circumstances the sell still owns the bike and is the one who has his bike stolen. But at no point does the delivery company own the bike or has the right to sell it
It really depends on the terms of the contracts involved. Section 11 says that they get the title of the item if they determine it is undeliverable "for whatever reason":
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.
That's not true. The second you accept compensation for the item posted the delivery company takes ownership of the goods and they are free to do with them whatever they see fit, including selling them if they are ever found.
The terms linked in my sibling comment expressly say otherwise. The title remains with the seller until they either deliver it or decide to dispose of it. Which is hilarious.
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.
If you need compensation for loss of opportunity and loss of profit and such, then there are companies which will happily accept liability for such for a sufficient financial incentive. Regular consumer-grade postage services very specifically exclude liability for anything outside of the delivery itself.
> Surely.........they reimburse both sides for it?
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.)
Yep both parties get reimbursed and sellers get protection from negative feedback resulting from it. Funny enough Pitney Bowes (the ones actually running GSP) just action off these items.
Ugh, eBay. Still hasn't solved ~10 % of buyers blatantly abusing "buyer protection" to get stuff for free.
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.
It’s a market reality, they can employ what I consider to be abusive practices like this because enough merchants accept it as a cost of doing business. But I wouldn’t call it “incorrect” exactly. If a merchant wants to submit to that, it’s a free country (thus far).
The site sells a bunch of retrocomputing emulator products. It's not at all unlikely that some of this looks like hacking or R/E devices and fell afoul of someone's filter (or maybe they sell a keylogger or something unsavory that I just didn't see).
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.
I don’t think the trade names you’ve used in “Contents” are very descriptive. Something along the lines of “Hobby Electronics” might be more appropriate. I’d also consult a trade expert on this but I think spec’ing the origin as US may be part of the problem because no doubt there are Chinese components on your assemblies. Receiving countries will want to tariff commodities based on the actual origin.
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.
A freight forwarding service like MyUS.com could be of help here.
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.)
There’s actually quite a few one to many. They’re designed mostly for cross border distribution (Canada to US where they’ll truck pallets over the border then drop off at usps in bulk).
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.
Seems like main issue you have is with corruption, not customs. Corruption is bad regardless.
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.
The only thing I really care about for customs is bombs and human trafficking. I wish they would focus on those things and not just getting in the way of things. Maddening that my tax money is spent on preventing me doing stuff.
you should also be concerned about pests riding along with your fruit, ready to destroy your country's ecosystem. there's boring yet legitimate stuff to scan for.
This is a lie. If you live in a rich country you consume thousands of different things a day. If you live in a poor country and are really poor, you might consume hundreds.
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.
Well, such a wild accusation requires a source. I can name several examples where tariffs were introduced specifically to protect local industries, mostly farmers, because it would be cheaper to just import foreign apples or carrots than locally grown, but obviously if you allow that to happen you don't have an apple or carrot growing industry next year. You could argue that "rich farm owners lobbied politicians to avoid competition" but you couldn't be any further from the truth. It was demanded by the farmer cooperatives and unions through protests, not some wealthy magnates.
It really depends on the context. Focusing only on the price a costumer pays as your main metric ignores a lot of potentially negative externalities.
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
No. They aren't supposed to protect the population. This is a lame excuse to implement it without popular revolt.
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!
For me, banning the import of legal goods is something else.
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.
No. A good compromise is leaving business between A and B if you are C. If you produce the best textile in the world and charge only a penny, but someone would prefer to pay a pound for something awful from overseas, they should have the liberty to do so. It's none of your business how other people trade.
This is the craziest idea I've ever heard when it comes to economics . Isn't that basically the libertarian "everyone should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want to do" approach?
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.
I thought we were having a civilized discussion, not Reddit back and forth.
But to answer your actual question - societies decide it, through trade bodies, through unions, through courts, through commissions , parliaments, senates and so forth. Individualism is nonsense and never makes sense out of internet arguments.
Society as a whole doesn't decide shit like you pretend. People with power to force their ideas unto others by means of violence promoted by the state do.
Wait, why do you even expect me to have a civilized discussion with someone who says that they feel empowered to block my voluntary transactions with other people because you don't like how you are left out of it?
Be an adult. Go mind your own business.
Your childish collectivism is nonsense. Individualism? Okay, you mean basic adult behavior of respecting boundaries is nonsense and want to be taken seriously?
No, it's just that your entire argument is built as if there are no governments, or if there are then ideally they should piss off and let everyone do whatever they want. You are completely allowed to have such an opinion, and I'm completely allowed to think it's an unreasonable and unrealistic opinion to have. What I mean but "individualism nonsense" is that your right to conduct business as an individual does not surpass the right of the society to not be negatively impacted by your decisions. This is not a statement that's seriously debatable outside of some nieche libertarian circles.
>>why do you even expect me to have a civilized discussion with someone who says that they feel empowered to block my voluntary transactions with other people because you don't like how you are left out of it?
I don't know why you're making this some sort of weird me Vs you argument(you take what I say way too personally), governments the world over already regulate what kind of business two willing parties X and Y are allowed to have. This is a discussion to establish where the line is. But of course feel free to tell me to mind my own business.
Tariffs don't protect local businesses, they charge local customers more in order to punish foreign companies. Besides being a tax on your own population, they have bad effects on other local businesses both because you didn't predict their foreign inputs and because they're always followed by retaliation on your own exports.
Norway has import duties on apples a few months a year. Tell me how that's not to protect the income of our local apple farmers.
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.
>>You are punishing people who want to eat apples and beef for the crime of being able to pay less for it.
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.
It’s pretty well accepted that tariffs lead to overall worse outcomes for all parties involved.
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.
> It’s pretty well accepted that tariffs lead to overall worse outcomes for all parties involved.
Including the periods you can't import required/essential goods for various reasons and local production no longer exists due to previous cheap imports?
>>Tariffs don't protect local businesses, they charge local customers more in order to punish foreign companies.
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.
If you buy something directly from another country then you are both a local customer and an importing entity. I bought some electronics from Hong Kong recently and had to pay 40% again when it entered the EU. There aren't any local businesses who make these things.
If you were importing from HK to EU I'm not aware of many tariffs that would apply on electronics, I guess you just paid VAT and customs duty, and neither is what I'm talking about here.
only if there is positive price elasticity, and that depends on market dynamics (price is a function of both supply and demand).
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.
Thus making the prices of their local competitors more attractive. Ergo, protecting local producers.
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.
It's not really working that well except that some of it serves their other ends, like being able to enforce laws on local companies better.
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.
By not allowing amazon, google etc to do business in their country they enabled the development of huge, profitable corporations like Alibaba, Tencent etc that now employ advanced personnel like software developers, ML engineers etc, invest in university research, and overall have great positive impact in their economy.
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)
They have Baidu because they have the industrial policy, higher education system and subsidies to produce Baidu. If another country banned Google they would simply not have Google and that would be it.
Note that Yandex and VK exist in Russia without having to ban all competition.
So it seems blanket tariffs are as bad as blanket free passes to imports.
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.
There's nothing particularly special about factories that says we have to have them just because it's more romantic than a services economy. And we do have many kinds of manufacturing, as does Europe - we create many of the pieces that are then final assembled in China.
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.
It is not about romanticism. Manufacturing inherently is more resource intensive and has broader indirect impact to the economy. Take 10 restaurants with 100 employees and a plant with 100 employees.
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.
Being able to buy stuff cheaper is actually good because both supply and demand exist. A better way to grow an economy is to do "export discipline", the opposite of import restriction, where you force your local industries to be international quality so that other countries buy from you.
That might be great if the good we're talking about is consumer electronics. (At least economically. Environmentally or socially perhaps we'd be better off without consumer electronics.)
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.
If foreign food or textiles are cheaper than your local production in a developing nation, it seems your population is suffering from those inflated prices and the aggregate good of the nation may very well be improved by having more food and clothing available at lower-than-current prices. Anything less is forcing your local population to subsidize the inefficient-but-domestic production of goods.
The problem is that free or cheap subsidized goods sent to developing countries to help them along ruin prices on the local market and remove local suppliers. There are many examples of well-meant, but badly thought out aid making things worse.
Suffering until global supply chains are disrupted. And when that happens, your country’s lack of production independence becomes a vulnerability. Like how things are right now.
What good is it to live in a wealthy nation, if being a citizen means you have to operate at cut throat efficiency in order to keep up? Creating slack for the average man to enjoy is also a valuable national economic goal.
There’s an old joke about a statistician who drowned in water that was only one meter deep - On Average.
Thinking in terms of aggregate value neglects the possibility that you will create winners and losers in such a scenario and creating a system of transfers to share the aggregate surplus is politically difficult.
I agree it's a sovereign nation's call on what to do, but it seems like improving the lot of everyone who buys food (10s of millions of people) is something I'd be more inclined to do than to ensure that farmers (10s of hundreds of people) who are demonstrably uncompetitive continue to have a path to profitability anyway.
There are 2.6 million farmers in the US, or about 1.3% of the employed population. In less developed economies farmers are a much higher percentage of the population. We are talking about helping tens of millions of people who are farming. In Nigeria for example, it’s 35% of the population. Only in very tiny countries are there only ‘tens of hundreds’ of farmers.
Do you really think that wiping out employment for a third of the population would improve the economy? It takes money to make money.
Do you really think that harming 2 people for every 1 you help is obviously the best course of action? (It’s not obviously better to me, though you point out some ways that it might not be as bad as that framing suggests.)
in a similar vein, i could drown in a bathtub, but it's not likely. more rationale is needed here around whether that risk is worth considering seriously.
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 is the correct answer if you run a business. Customs brokers accept responsibility for making sure the packages go through the process successfully and usually have access to customer support channels normal mortals don't have.
While I agree, this shouldn't be the case though. The lack of transparency and accountability from a government agency is absurd but then again, these values don't seem to matter anymore.
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.
Absolutely 1000% agreed. But this parson specifically made a blog post basically saying "I run a business, I'm screwed, please help". Well, the immediate step would be to pay a broker to make sure those packages leave the US successfully and be doesn't lose customers. Then he can contact his representatives and complain second.
Yes, you have to pay them of course if you use their services, but it's also possible you can call one up and get a nice person who will take a minute or two & freely tell you if there's a current issue they're aware of.
Tell this guy to call a customs brokerage like flexport. Entrepreneurs should focus on making things people want and connecting with customers. Turn everything else over to specialists with experience and scale. Most of all customs regs.
>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.
That's interesting. PayPal's built-in mailing software, which is what we use for international shipments, will not print signatures for you in this space - you have to sign international labels by hand. Seems like an oversight on their part if you're correct.
Customs has a complicated relationship with postal vs. courier imports.
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.
There is something to be said for packaging products such that they are not selected for screening. Won’t help this guy now, his stuff is flagged. But once we started shipping our international orders in a bubble envelope instead of a small box, we had many fewer returns as a result of unpaid import duty by the recipient.
Maybe they have a crappy algorithm that sees "EMU" and thinks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu and says "nope, we're not touching animals, you need a special form"?
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.
That's pretty much par for course with the USPS. One of the selling points of UPS/FedEx is that they have actual proper customer service (at least for large accounts).
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.
I've seen USPS packages get marked as "delivered" quite a while after they've been physically delivered. Like half an hour later, if not more. Unless it was physically impossible to get to the marked location within that amount of time, I don't think you can assume the timing to mean anything as to its actual delivery.
The sticker their package got links to the United States Postal Inspectors website which indicates this is USPS inspectors rather than an unrelated government agency.
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...