Hi Superconductor,
I’m really sorry you had to go through all this. We’ve tried very hard to support you including two of my best people (Paul and Omy). Paul even offered to check his work email over the weekend to work with you while you made your decision to pay the fees.
FedEx is explicitly good at getting packages where they need to be, quickly. Unfortunately they are very bad at being transparent with their fees. Duties and taxes are a moving target as well. On any given day, with a room full of different customs officials, you will see a different tax on two of the same packages. There is no way for us to know what every country’s officials will assess. $133 is quite steep and I can understand why you would refuse paying, and it’s frustrating for us because so often what happens seems to be out of our hands.
Would you recommend we change anything so we can avoid this happening again for other customers?
Ordering from one of our distributors is a good way to avoid the individual handling fees assessed with a small package, but they too have to pay taxes on the boards they bring in. Sometimes you’ll see that reflected in the retail price, but often times the retail price is very competitive to ordering directly from SparkFun.
I hope you’ll reconsider purchasing SparkFun products from us or one of our distros in the future.
And Roko - you can just go visit Lee’s Electronics. You’re so lucky to have such a great electronics shop in Vancouver!
Have fun building your projects!
-Nathan