Has anyone in the USA recently purchased an instrument from the UK or Eire?
I know it’s a crazy time and I wanted to find out about the current situation.
Thanks!
Not an instrument, but I have purchased a few things shipped from Ireland ($200-ish so not as high value as an instrument). The business shipped from AnPost. I don’t know how the paperwork worked on the seller’s side, but they gave AnPost my email address and AnPost contacted me so that i could pay the “applicable taxes and administration fees” before they brought it to the US. It probably added a few days time. This was in August and September of 2025.
Here is an email I just recieved from Lir:
We wanted to let you know about an important change to US import rules that is currently affecting many parcels coming from Ireland.
US Customs now requires duties to be paid before your parcel arrives in the United States.
Once your order has been shipped, you will receive a shipping confirmation email containing your tracking number. Shortly after that, you will be contacted (by email or phone) to pay the customs charges.
You have only 5 days to pay these customs charges.
If payment is not made within that window, the parcel will be automatically returned to us. Unfortunately, many packages are being returned at the moment because customers miss the payment request.
What you need to do:
-
As soon as you receive your shipping confirmation email, please keep an eye on the tracking and watch for the customs payment request.
-
Your tracking number is in the shipping confirmation email.
-
If you have trouble tracking your parcel, you can enter the same tracking number on:
https://parcelsapp.com/en/tracking -
You can also contact USPS, who will have information about your parcel using that tracking number.
-
Our customs declarations include both your email address and phone number, so the payment request should reach you through one or both of these.
If your parcel is already returning to us:
If we see that your parcel is on its way back to Ireland, we will work on sending it out again. However, please keep watching your tracking number so you’ll know when the parcel is being resent.
Thank you all for being so patient while we work through these new shipping rules — we truly appreciate your understanding.
Warm regards,
We wanted to let you know about an important change to US import rules that is currently affecting many parcels coming from Ireland.
US Customs now requires duties to be paid before your parcel arrives in the United States.
Once your order has been shipped, you will receive a shipping confirmation email containing your tracking number. Shortly after that, you will be contacted (by email or phone) to pay the customs charges.
You have only 5 days to pay these customs charges.
If payment is not made within that window, the parcel will be automatically returned to us. Unfortunately, many packages are being returned at the moment because customers miss the payment request.
What you need to do:
-
As soon as you receive your shipping confirmation email, please keep an eye on the tracking and watch for the customs payment request.
-
Your tracking number is in the shipping confirmation email.
-
If you have trouble tracking your parcel, you can enter the same tracking number on:
https://parcelsapp.com/en/tracking -
You can also contact USPS, who will have information about your parcel using that tracking number.
-
Our customs declarations include both your email address and phone number, so the payment request should reach you through one or both of these.
If your parcel is already returning to us:
If we see that your parcel is on its way back to Ireland, we will work on sending it out again. However, please keep watching your tracking number so you’ll know when the parcel is being resent.
Thank you all for being so patient while we work through these new shipping rules — we truly appreciate your understanding.
Warm regards,
Kyle
Thanks for the info!
“Many packages are being returned because customers miss the payment request.”
That makes me worry. The whole process seems cumbersome and prone to problems.
I think you are lucky if your package gets returned as opposed to simply destroyed. Recent news articles have reported that UPS was destroying thousands of packages that were rejected by US customs. The reason for destroying them was simply that the rate of rejections was far exceeding the rate at which UPS could contact senders and verify that they would be willing to pay for return of the package. The only way they could manage the massive accumulation of undeliverable packages that was overflowing their storage capacity, was to destroy them and inform customers later that their package had been destroyed. The implication being that they do not accept responsibility for delivering or returning packages that are rejected by US customs. And US customs certainly doesn’t accept responsibility for rejected packages getting returned. And the customer really has no control over what happens once the package leaves their possession.
The whole process is most definitely cumbersome, prone to problems, and not really workable in large scale. But I think that may have been the whole point behind it.
The UK’s Royal Mail attempted to put a similar system in place to deal with new US tariffs, but it wasn’t working last time I looked, because US customs were rejecting packages that had had their duties paid ahead of time, due to incorrect labeling and other issues of confusion over the process itself. The UK’s system is called PDDP (Postal Delivered Duties Paid), and the sender in the UK pays the duties ahead of time at a UK post office, when sending the package.
Thanks for the info.
Looks like I’m going to limit myself to instruments already within US borders for the time being.
A few years ago I had something I bought on Ebay from a seller in England seized at Ebay’s UK shipping facility.
I got a refund from Ebay.
Wondering what had happened, I contacted the seller.
The seller told me that he had got a notice from Ebay that the item was “forbidden” and the package was destroyed. The seller got no refund.
The strange thing was that the item wasn’t forbidden by anybody, and something which at the time was being shipped from the UK to the US all the time with no problems.
Then it got even stranger, when, only a month later, that same item showed up on Ebay being sold by a different English seller. So I contacted HIM to get his side of the story, which was that he had bought the package at an Ebay auction of “undeliverable” packages.
When I posted this tale at the time I was told by some people in the UK that it was a scam which had been reported in the British press: somebody at Ebay’s UK facility would grab random packages, declare them “forbidden”, send them to another buddy who worked in the place that auctioned off “undeliverable” packages, and pocket the money.