@fort2b wrote:
why does the program have to pay duty and taxes on my behalf at all? Why can't duties and taxes just be collected when the item comes over the border like has been done for decades.
It's been done that way for decades for items sent by mail, but it's not done that way for any other shipping method. Even items sent by carriers such as UPS have taxes and duty "advanced" by the carrier or an agent for the carrier.
Items shipped through the Global Shipping Program are sent in a palette of commercial freight and are cleared as such. It's simply a different way of dealing with the issue of remitting monies owing to the feds and is more efficient for commercial importers.
It's also mentioned in the terms and conditions that buyers using the GSP presumably agree to that Pitney Bowes will be acting as importer of record on a GSP shipment, not the eBay buyer.
@fort2b wrote:
If sellers are too lazy to write customs forms and put them on their packages then fine, GSP can do it for them....but there is no need for GSP to collect duty and taxes.
It doesn't collect duty and taxes. It pays them. The buyer pays Pitney Bowes back.
This is why taxes and duty don't show up as line items on a receipt for a GSP sale. Technically speaking, the buyer didn't pay them.
@fort2b wrote:
As soon as a middle man gets involved, costs go up because that middle man wants a cut, a piece of the action....and then Ebay gets a percentage of that..
If you do the number crunching, the cut of the "import charges" is usually around five bucks, much less than what you'd pay in brokerage fees for an item shipped by UPS or FedEx Ground, and less than what Canada Post charges for collecting duty and taxes charged by CBSA on a postal import.
I'll admit it's harder to figure out who's getting what in the shipping charges, but my semi-educated guess is that the charge for shipping the item from Kentucky to the Canadian receiving hub is less than what it costs to ship the item from the hub to its final destination.
@fort2b wrote:
The other reason GSP is bad is because items get shipped twice. They get shipped to the shipping center by the seller, where they are repackaged and sent to the buyer. Twice as much chances for things to get broken and lost and the second packing is by someone who possibly doesn't give a rat's behind about my item.
I haven't purchased much in the way of GSP items and neither has my wife, but my items have simply been opened and resealed, rather than repacked. My wife once received some CDs that were overpacked by the seller with bubble wrap taped around them and placed in a box about three times the size of the stack of CDs and the box was filled with foam peanuts. The box was the one originally used by the seller so my conclusion is that the GSP worker didn't do any sort of repacking..
As you note later, many sellers don't realize that they're using the GSP. The sellers' packing jobs may reflect this as they don't realize they should be packing for a freight shipment to Canada. They're also not providing PB with the info that they need to determine an item's country of origin. The official word is that this information is why most GSP items are opened: to check for this information.
As I say, no question the program isn't generally a good fit for Canadian buyers purchasing items that can be shipped more than adequately as oversized letters from the United States or United Kingdom, but I think most of these problems stem from poor communication of the program to eBay users. If US sellers took the time to read and understand updates to their eBay user agreement, they likely wouldn't be winding up in this program and/or using it inappropriately.
@fort2b wrote:
This move of hiding import charges by Ebay shows GSP is struggling and they are having to resort to trickery to prop it up.
Struggling it what way? I think this may have something to do with the eBay "study" on tax and duty levies on personal imports, and may be an attempt to get buyers riled up enough to push for an increase in the de minimis.
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