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I am summarizing my experiences with shipment to Germany and the customs process so that people know what to expect.
Once the Order shipped from Canada, I received a Canada Post tracking number. The parcel took 4 days to arrive at the main Customs office at Frankfurt airport. There it stayed for 11 days until on day 12 it started moving to a place 70 km from where I live. On the morning of that day The Canada Post tracker stated: “Item successfully delivered”. Strange, since I was at home during that time and nothing was delivered.
What you need to know here is that DHL has the monopoly of shipping parcels that require Customs intervention. Therefore, I was able to continue to track the parcel with the DHL tracker using the Canada Post tracking number. The next day the parcel moved again, this time to the local customs office. The DHL tracker did not give the location of the office but I knew that this was the one 10 km away. Normally, I would then receive a letter from DHL with further instructions. By Tuesday the letter had not arrived, so I called up the Customs Office and asked whether a parcel from Canada hat arrived for me. I was lucky and got immediately a friendly Customs officer on the phone who looked up the parcel for me and told me I could pick it up. Which I did immediately. I went there with the printed out invoice and the relevant customs code (HS Code 89031010) to speed up the process. There was luckily no queue, but the unpacking, typing out the declaration and paying took about half an hour. I had to pay 1.7% Customs duty and 19% VAT.
In the office they told me that they would have kept the package for 7 days and then returned to Canada but if I announced the package (over the phone or in person) they could hold it longer for a fee. Next day I got the letter from DHL, they wrote that the package would be kept for 14 days, I could pick it up nyself or for a fee of roughly 35 Eurons they could handle the customs formalities.
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Thanks for posting this, Harald. I will add a link to this post in the Germany section of the Will I Have to Pay Taxes or Import Duties page so more people will see it. Cheers!
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