In relation to the first part of the essay, how smoothly Amazon handles customs, that's not my experience in Brazil. Specifically, Amazon makes one rather large error, they include the shipping costs in the declared customs value, so you end up paying import duties and sales tax on the combined product + shipping, which is just plain wrong. Recently for example I bought a product valued at US$35 and shipping charges were US$25, but I ended up paying duties and sales tax on US$60 instead of US$35. Amazon pre-charged me those duties and tax, and since they declared the package as having a value of US$60 the Brazilian customs happily charged them that amount, so no refund for me.
I've written to [email protected] about it a couple of times and not gotten any reply whatsoever.
I've written to [email protected] about it a couple of times and not gotten any reply whatsoever.