Parcel to China from U.K.

My mum just sent me a parcel that had a declared value of 200 pounds. It got stopped by the customs people and we had to pay tax on it of about 300 rmb, but it was delivered without any issue.

How much is your parcel worth? More importantly, how much are you writing down as the value of the items? My advice for you is to undervalue the parcel greatly to ensure that is arrives without delay.

Obviously, you would think that the downside is that if your parcel is lost you can't claim back the correct amount. However I have had many parcels lost both being sent to China and being sent from China and I am yet to see a single penny from either Royal Mail or China Post for the lost parcels.

Hi - we had some stuff sent out and had no issues. Then we did a repeat and were told that the limit if RMB1,000 (£113) - not a lot! It depends who is on duty I guess. And you will still need to pay customs. By the way, ship using UPS -  they are SO much better than DHL who tend to sit on parcels and then charge storage fees!!!

Hello Lisa!

What and How did you write the address? 

In my experience, the processing at the post office and at the customs office is related to some “externalities”:

Use a company address if possible! Parcels send e.g. to a university (if your son is a teacher) seems to “bypass” the customs office to some extent.

Use an address written in Chinese! Parcels with a Chinese address on the outside seems to less carefully checked than parcels with an English address. You can use the service d'adresse mondial (see Wikipedia!) to deal with Chinese addresses if you cannot write Chinese :-D

Ask a Chinese! For example, Chinese-owned travel agencies sometimes organises big piles of parcels to be send together. This will also reduce costs!

Hope this helps!

Greetings from Austria,

Lise