Further to my previous post I sent a Message to Robert @ Varese highlighting the situation, its a shame that Varese will lose customers here in the UK owing to this, pity they cannot get another company to act as agents in Europe to distribute their product. Come on Varese please sort this out!
Well I don't think Varese are going to lose any business. If they release something that I want (so very rare these days), I'm just not going to buy it from them, so they still make the sale, but don't have all the hassle of sending it.
Not happy, had an order from Varese, two items both in the sale @$5.00 and had to pay in addition to the postage of $23.00 a UK customs charge £13.48 all because the US customs form was incorrectly filled in showing the items at full price Arrrgh!!! — feeling crazy. Have found a form on the UK Boarder Agency to try and get a refund, need to send a copy of the invoice confirming the amount I paid and the Customs Label, so lets see what has happened. I like everyone else would have expected the amount I actually paid = $10.00 to be declared on the Customs Label!
Peter, please let me know how you get on with this, if it works, I may ask for assistance! Thanks.
Luckily I could sort out everything at the customs office.
Unfortunately that's not the end of the story. Packaging this time proved to be completely different with NO PROTECTION for the CDs whatsoever. Which resulted in two CDs with slight cracks (to be honest such things can/ do always happen) and a third CD case that was completely obliterated. If someone just had jumped on the CD it probably would look exactly the same. I've never seen such a bad case of a broken CD-case before. Luckily the CDs are still intact, but the booklet got damaged as well.
This one is simple: Varèse is supposed to declare the price PAID, not the full list price. It's not rocket science. If Varèse is not adhering to this, they're actually inflating the cost of their CDs. If that package were to get lost in the mail, Varèse could theoretically recoup from their lost package claim double the amount the customer paid them. I'm in no way saying that is the reason for their mis-declaration on customs slips, but if they were to do it, THAT would also be mail fraud.
