This is very useful info. Thank you for taking the time to write it up for everyone!
We have had other orders where the goods were classified as “aluminum from Russia”. We still have several ongoing disputes with UPS and they haven’t yet been able to explain to us how they assigned the tariff classes.
Did you have to pay the $200 and now you’re claiming it back?
Yeah they’re really terrible about it. Once it gets to UPS in the US, they assign a heading from the HTS to assess any duties. From what I can tell, by that point it’s pretty hard to change prior to delivery, and the recipient basically has to pay whatever it is, or risk it being sent back. After you pay, you can file the dispute. Thanks to the current administration making tariffs a mess, the backlog for disputes is weeks or months at UPS and I’m guessing all the other big shippers. They will get to you, but it’s a long wait.
Once they do get back to you, the first thing they’ll ask for is the HTS heading you think it should actually be under, and have you explain why. For me it was pretty simple - I just supplied them with images of the unit (not even photos, I just grabbed them from the website), pointed out it had no significant amounts of aluminum, and gave them the heading number for microcontrollers. They were actually pretty happy they didn’t have to walk someone through the process of finding the heading (I’ve had to do something similar for international shipping at work before) or look for it themselves, which I doubt they’d do anyway. At that point, UPS will dispute the tariff with US Customs and Border Protection, which takes more time (again, can be months). That’s where my dispute currently stands. Hopefully this should be the last step prior to a refund.
If you can figure out how to pre-empt this whole thing, you’ll win one for the good guys.
I think you are the only one who actually went through this on their own. That’s amazing. All the other customers would simply reject to pay the customs and claim a refund on us… which is understandable. Nobody wants to pay $200 worth of customs on an $100 order. We refunded those and now we’re disputing with UPS ourselves. They want us to cover the customs fees as well as the return shipping. It’s completely ridiculous.
We now ship with FedEx instead and haven’t had issues so far, which is good because we were close to shutting down sales to the US completely. It’s such a mess.