Germany: personal import, and what it actually costs here
Germany: personal import, and what it actually costs here. Change my mind, genuinely — I have no stake in being right about this.
The rules where I live changed between two orders six months apart. Nothing was announced; I found out by reading.
Got a request for information and treated it as a seizure for two days before actually reading it. It was neither dramatic nor difficult.
Clearance took four days and the carrier took eleven. I had been blaming entirely the wrong stage for a year.
Sceptical readings welcome. The confident ones are the ones I distrust.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Country added to the title. Without it the answers will be confidently wrong.
Research-use-only labelling is a description of intended use, not a customs classification. It does not by itself determine how anything is treated at a border.
Correction: that is a request for information, not a seizure notice. Different document, different process, different deadline.
Correcting myself upthread: the guidance I quoted was superseded last year.
Which country, and which country did it ship from?
Small fix — those rules apply to commercial import. Personal import is governed separately and more narrowly.
Declared value and product description are chosen by the shipper. Asking what they use is a legitimate pre-order question and the answer tells you how routine this is for them.
clearance time is not carrier time
Asked the supplier what documentation travels with the shipment and got a straight answer. That was reassuring in itself.
keep the paperwork, including the boring parts
That delay was at clearance, not with the carrier. The lane table separates them for exactly this reason.
regional stock removes the question entirely
personal import rules are not the same as commercial import rules
Where a supplier holds regional stock, the shipment is domestic and there is no import event at all. That is the structural fix rather than a workaround.
declared value and description are the shipper’s decisions, ask what they use
do not post your own address details when asking
A hold, a request for information and a seizure are distinct administrative events. Each has its own process and deadlines, and the notice itself states which one you have.
How long has it been sitting, and at which stage?
a hold is not a seizure and people conflate them constantly
- 1regional stock removes the question entirely8 comments in this branch · started by u/rekha_mbeki