Rutger
Well-Known Member
Customs/taxes are charged by the country that the product is imported to, not by the country from which the object is exported from.
The US Government has no income from customs/taxes from exported goods, so the US Government has no reason to oblige ebay to collect customs/taxes for them (unless the US Gov't is put under pressure by other governments to do so, which would seem unlikely).
When customs/taxes are calculated, the office that calculates them wil charge the buyer with the costs of calculating the customas/taxes.
If ebay also actually collects the customs/taxes it would appear that ebay has taken over that part from the goods importing offices that used to do that; hence ebay is going to make once more extra money on every product that is sold. For ebay it is pretty easy to determine the customs/taxes: they already have all the information (type of object, value, country of the winner, cost of shipping) digitally available in the auction, so it's just adding the software to calculate everything. Fully automated, so the cost for them is almost nothing.
This is contrary to the way customs offices have to work: they will have to check the contents of the package, look up the value, look up the cost of shipping and then calculate, which is a lot of handling before the outcome is known.
It's not clear to me how or even if ebay actually collects these customs/taxes; if they do they will have to transfer the money to the respective governments. Maybe they closed a deal with these governments?
Maybe it's a calculation that ebay provides with the auction and the info is used by the importing offices. If so, it's more likely that many importing countries have put pressure on ebay to think of ways to minimize importing fraud.
The US Government has no income from customs/taxes from exported goods, so the US Government has no reason to oblige ebay to collect customs/taxes for them (unless the US Gov't is put under pressure by other governments to do so, which would seem unlikely).
When customs/taxes are calculated, the office that calculates them wil charge the buyer with the costs of calculating the customas/taxes.
If ebay also actually collects the customs/taxes it would appear that ebay has taken over that part from the goods importing offices that used to do that; hence ebay is going to make once more extra money on every product that is sold. For ebay it is pretty easy to determine the customs/taxes: they already have all the information (type of object, value, country of the winner, cost of shipping) digitally available in the auction, so it's just adding the software to calculate everything. Fully automated, so the cost for them is almost nothing.
This is contrary to the way customs offices have to work: they will have to check the contents of the package, look up the value, look up the cost of shipping and then calculate, which is a lot of handling before the outcome is known.
It's not clear to me how or even if ebay actually collects these customs/taxes; if they do they will have to transfer the money to the respective governments. Maybe they closed a deal with these governments?
Maybe it's a calculation that ebay provides with the auction and the info is used by the importing offices. If so, it's more likely that many importing countries have put pressure on ebay to think of ways to minimize importing fraud.
