I have not only heard this, but can actually CONFIRM it. When I was hit by the charges for Modo, I actually asked the guy who delivered it straight out why the import duty was in the region of 25%. He said to me:
“It’s not. There’s VAT at 17.5%, and the rest is our fee for bringing it through Customs.”
I also verified this when I received Joe’s Rigging CD’s. They came via a different courier, and I got whacked with a charge. I wasn’t in at the time, so my father refused to sign for it. The courier took it back to the depot, and I rang up when I got home to rearrange delivery. I asked them about the charge, and they said it was all tax, so I rang up Customs and Excise, and they told me that they have loads of similar calls every day asking the same question. He stated that Customs only apply the 17.5% VAT. Anything over and above that is charged by the Courier as a ‘handling fee’.
Effectively when buying a piece of software from the States, us Europeans are getting royally screwed. Essentially, we are paying for the shipping twice: once at time of purchase, and then again before we can actually take hold of what we have bought.
That’s why I think all US-based software companies that don’t have resellers within the EU should offer a download-only version of their software. They will lose an awful lot of custom when people find out that they get charged again to get hold of their software.
It’s down to two groups of people: the EU bureaucrats is Brussels (who should leave everything alone, but that’s another story), and the Courier services (all of them). Because of them, users are getting annoyed, and software companies are probably losing money.
