Quote:
Originally Posted by Slawomir
Nevertheless, the bottom line is that tax needs to be accounted for when considering buying astro-gear above $1000 US to avoid disappointment.
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Yes, freight, tax and clearance costs need to be taken into consideration, as does warranty.
In regard to warranty, items are expensive to ship back to point of sale from Australia, particularly large items, and that seriously needs to be taken into consideration. This is the reason, with certain items, I would only ever purchase locally. For instance, I would never buy a telescope with electronics, such as my Celestron SCT, from overseas. The cost of returning it overseas, for warranty, is astronomical (no pun intended), furthermore, there are then the added clearance cost on its return. And, I might add, there is Ciustoms paperwork that has to be completed when sending items overseas for repair, otherwise you may incur taxes on top of the clearance costs.
However, many items, including tax and clearance costs are still cheaper overseas. I recently did an analysis, when there was talk about removing the tax free threshold. I still found, in many cases, the 10% tax still made it viable to purchase overseas. I made a submission to the minister in this regard, as it is stupid to charge tax on low value items, when it is more expensive to collect that tax, than what the tax would raise.
However, the real issue for me now, is that I have noticed an increase in the clearance costs, as they have risen quite a bit over the past few years. But, this can be mitigated by bringing in several items at once, thus spreading the clearance costs over these several items.
If I cannot keep items below the threshold, I wait and added all the items into one shipment.