Customs for Jewelry bought online (overseas to USA)

[LightBright]

Recently I‘ve found some nice jewelry pieces on Etsy or EBay but they are from overseas. How does one calculate cost of Customs before buying jewelry from, for example, Australia or Italy? Can anyone tell me their experience and thoughts on this? TIA

 

[winnietucker]

What exactly are you looking at? Certain things (like coral IIRC) will be a bit more difficult. Might be worth it to call a customs brokerage. I used to work for one and we’d tell people what to expect $ wise and if it was even worth utilizing our services. We only charged if you actually used us.

Edit:Just realized which forum this was in lol. I’ll leave this here in case anyone ever Google searches the topic. I can’t speak on importing diamonds as I’ve been out of the industry for a few years at this point.

 

[Rfisher]

I bought a diamond eternity band from London and shipped to the USA.
I believe that DHL took care of all that one stop for me, and I think I even remember DHL had/has an estimator calculator thing on their website.

is there a more complicated way, but cheaper? Maybe - I don’t know. But I appreciated the ease and one does all.

 

[Sakuracherry]

I think it depends on the declared value and the carrier. I recently bought a diamond ring from England, but didn’t have to pay any duty. The seller used RoyalMail and the package was insured/tracked. When I bought simple gold band from Portugal about 8 years ago, I had to pay about $20.

I don’t know how reliable this calculator is, but you can try to see how much you are expected to pay.

Import Duty Calculator

Calculate import duty and taxes in the web-based calculator. It's fast and free to try and covers over 100 destinations worldwide.

www.simplyduty.com

 

[LightBright]

What exactly are you looking at? Certain things (like coral IIRC) will be a bit more difficult. Might be worth it to call a customs brokerage. I used to work for one and we’d tell people what to expect $ wise and if it was even worth utilizing our services. We only charged if you actually used us.

Edit:Just realized which forum this was in lol. I’ll leave this here in case anyone ever Google searches the topic. I can’t speak on importing diamonds as I’ve been out of the industry for a few years at this point.

Hi thank you for your valuable comments. I’m browsing vintage rings with small diamonds in them. But I don’t know whether to consider an overseas purchase too administratively difficult and expensive or not...

 

[Matthews1127]

My diamonds were imported from Israel to NY.
Customs was $30.00.
This was Dec., 2017.
The package was then shipped from NY to PA.
I paid PA import taxes, later.
Hope this helps.