Netherlands customs time

[stan1110]

Before bugging customer support, I thought I ask it here.

 

I ordered a backpack during the free shipping WAN show. It was shipped quickly and moved fast across the world. But then it reached customs and has not moved through it in well over a week.
I'm not used to these long customs processing times, when I ordered the screwdriver barely a month before, it took less than 20 minutes to pass customs. And I start to wonder if this is normal for the backpack, if there is some other problem, or if I am just impatient?

If there is a problem, who or what should I contact?

[creesch]

What does the postnl Track and Trace say? As far as I know they handle it and you should get a message from them if you need to pay import fees. Which is something that did happen to me a while back, even though LMG tries to handle taxes properly. 

[stan1110]

23 minutes ago, creesch said:

What does the postnl Track and Trace say?

Not a whole lot.

 

Quote

 As far as I know they handle it and you should get a message from them if you need to pay import fees.

I'm expecting that they will contact me. I check every email, every post and the track and trace every day. It is almost part of my routine.

 

Quote

Which is something that did happen to me a while back, even though LMG tries to handle taxes properly. 

Was that for the backpack or something else? And how long did it take from arriving at customs and postNL reaching out?

[creesch]

21 minutes ago, stan1110 said:

Not a whole lot.

 

I'm expecting that they will contact me. I check every email, every post and the track and trace every day. It is almost part of my routine.

 

Was that for the backpack or something else? And how long did it take from arriving at customs and postNL reaching out?

 

That looks more like an error in general. What if you go to the website directly and copy in the code yourself? 

 

[stan1110]

9 hours ago, creesch said:

 

That looks more like an error in general. What if you go to the website directly and copy in the code yourself? 

 

Still nothing  .

 

[majorgiant]

Give it some time, packages can stay in customs for weeks (even though it is unusual, it is not unheard of). My last LTT package from june was also 1 full week in customs before i got the payment request. i'm assuming with the vacation periode they are short staffed and might take longer. 

[stan1110]

11 hours ago, majorgiant said:

i'm assuming with the vacation periode they are short staffed and might take longer. 

Off course vacation, I completely forgot about it. I will patiently wait for it longer even tho it is killing me. I hope I get it before school starts again since I don't have a backpack at the moment.

[ouchie]

It's almost a year since I ordered mine, so I can't check the track & trace details, but to give you a rough estimation, from shipment to delivery at home, it tooks 16 days.

 

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I'm expecting that they will contact me. I check every email, every post and the track and trace every day. It is almost part of my routine.

The inklaringskosten mail came after 13 days.

 

[LogicalDrm]

I think you should first contact local customs and ask them if there's any reason why its on hold. Like if there's surge of packages to be handled, they will prioritize bigger batches over consumer stuff. Here one reason might be the price being over some higher limit. At one point, the limit for higher scrutiny was at €150 (with the lower bar being at €60 I think). They might have changed, since lower bar for EU is at €22.

[stan1110]

I have an update that I like to document for future people. 11 minutes ago, I opened the post-NL app, and the LTTbackpack appeared in the app. I had to pay an additional €53,34. It took from July 26 till August 11 for the customs to process.

[basvanderwerff]

glad it went trough, they can keep it up till 30 days for future reference and till it out of customs it wil not show on the postnl tracker

On 8/8/2023 at 10:55 AM, LogicalDrm said:

I think you should first contact local customs and ask them if there's any reason why its on hold. Like if there's surge of packages to be handled, they will prioritize bigger batches over consumer stuff. Here one reason might be the price being over some higher limit. At one point, the limit for higher scrutiny was at €150 (with the lower bar being at €60 I think). They might have changed, since lower bar for EU is at €22.

there no lower bar anymore in NL

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, basvanderwerff said:

glad it went trough, they can keep it up till 30 days for future reference and till it out of customs it wil not show on the postnl tracker

there no lower bar anymore in NL

You mean there's no higher bar? Everything over €22 and outside of ETA must be declared.

[manikyath]

for anyone dealing with PostNL that doesnt deal with them often... pester them when this happens, pester them to no end, because they will actually take forever if you dont.

[tikker]

11 hours ago, manikyath said:

for anyone dealing with PostNL that doesnt deal with them often... pester them when this happens, pester them to no end, because they will actually take forever if you dont.

Domestically I highly prefer them, but ironically for international shipments they drop down my list and I have smoother experiences with other couriers.

[manikyath]

Just now, tikker said:

Domestically I highly prefer them, but ironically for international shipments they drop down my list and I have smoother experiences with other couriers.

i can only talk from experience using them in belgium, and i suppose the news is enough of an indication for how well that goes.

[TomWis]

For anyone that is/was in the same situation; my package got the status "Held at customs" at the 31st of july. Today, the 15th of August, the package appeared in the PostNL app and I got an e-mail asking to pay the import duties. However, I also paid 21% sales tax on checkout. It appears that I got charged sales tax twice.

 

As my package is above the €150 treshold, this seems to be a known issue: https://lttstore.gorgias.help/en-US/i-live-in-the-uk-eu-or-norway-and-ive-been-charged-for-sales-tax-twice-what-can-i-do-218298

So, when the package (finally) arrives, I'll have to take action myself and ask LTTStore to refund the tax. This is really frustrating. LTTStore should at the very least notify EU customers that this is a known issue!

[thematho]

I'm on the same situation in the Netherlands, but my package has arrived to customs on 28th of July, and no update ever since...

 

Update: I got my email notification to pay the handling and VAT, as @TomWis mentioned above, send a contact form to LTT Support team after you pay the extra cost to get a refund on it.

[basvanderwerff]

On 8/12/2023 at 9:58 PM, LogicalDrm said:

You mean there's no higher bar? Everything over €22 and outside of ETA must be declared.

they removed the lower 22euro bar 2 years ago

[basvanderwerff]

On 8/15/2023 at 1:38 PM, TomWis said:

For anyone that is/was in the same situation; my package got the status "Held at customs" at the 31st of july. Today, the 15th of August, the package appeared in the PostNL app and I got an e-mail asking to pay the import duties. However, I also paid 21% sales tax on checkout. It appears that I got charged sales tax twice.

 

As my package is above the €150 treshold, this seems to be a known issue: https://lttstore.gorgias.help/en-US/i-live-in-the-uk-eu-or-norway-and-ive-been-charged-for-sales-tax-twice-what-can-i-do-218298

So, when the package (finally) arrives, I'll have to take action myself and ask LTTStore to refund the tax. This is really frustrating. LTTStore should at the very least notify EU customers that this is a known issue!

sales tax is not import tax

[LogicalDrm]

19 minutes ago, basvanderwerff said:

they removed the lower 22euro bar 2 years ago

So there's only that upper bar? I thought the change was over all EU countries and to that lower limit only, so removing the upper bar.