RE: Australian Import Duty And Tax Charges Added To Everything In Prusa Store Prior To Checkout?
So I have some news on the matter, though it's not fully resolved yet.
Regretfully the option to not use the payment was a mistake on my part, this was something that was experimented on and an admin specific feature in testing, something I wasn't aware of. In regards to the costs, I've submitted your complaint to the team and they are reviewing it to make sure everything is correctly applied, so thank you for bringing this to our attention. I'm hoping for an update later today, but didn't want to wait any longer to update you either
RE: Australian Import Duty And Tax Charges Added To Everything In Prusa Store Prior To Checkout?
Hi Tommy, thanks for following up. Are you saying that:
1/ It can't be turned off
2/ The percentage applied and collected will be bought back closer to the tax collected
RE: Australian Import Duty And Tax Charges Added To Everything In Prusa Store Prior To Checkout?
I'm also curious now, since the black friday sales have been opened up.
I get what Prusa are trying to do, make the final price more transparent. I just don't see the transparency from the store page.
I haven't bought a small purchase (<$1000AUD) from Prusa before, but I'd assume you'd still pay tax on the balance in some way. My original printer purchase (many years ago now) tripped me up and was a learning experience regarding AU import tax, and I still use as an example to friends and the like. I added a couple spools of prusament, which pushed my total purchase to ~$1050 or so, just above the threshold. Which unbeknownst to me, triggered the import tax (I swear it was closer to 20% when it was all said and done, but my memory isn't great). So suddenly because I'd added 2x spools of filament, I was paying the extra import fee. The spools effectively cost me a couple hundred bucks because of the import tax, which was a little annoying when I realised.
I guess why I'm chiming in, is I'm guessing there are plenty of other similar stories and I can see what they're trying to achieve, I'm just not sure they've gotten exactly to where they intended and the pricing seems more obtuse. But that may be because over the years I've routinely been doing currency conversions, accounting for import tax and GST, etc every year since the original purchase, so to not have to do it anymore is asking for more trust from me than maybe I'm happy with? Not to mention it's trust that Prusa can account for every country's import fees flawlessly.
Maybe a breakdown of the cost would be good. Hell, the price change has been substantial enough that I haven't even tried dropping something into the cart to see if they've already included a breakdown of item cost, item tax, shipping, etc
RE: Australian Import Duty And Tax Charges Added To Everything In Prusa Store Prior To Checkout?
I have not had to pay any import tax or any other charges in the 8 years that I've been purchasing from Prusa, so long as it stayed under the de minimis of AUD$1000. Obviously if your items totalled over this amount then you are liable for the applicable import charges.
Unfortunately for us Australians, Prusa in all their wisdom have now decided that everything in their store is 12% to 16% more expensive, regardless of the total amount. And to top it off, they are charging this same percentage rate on shipping at checkout ON TOP of the already overinflated prices of the items in your cart. If anyone in Australia bought from Prusa with this new system in place would be throwing their money away.
I am still waiting on a response from Prusa to let us know if we Australians will have the option to turn off this added "feature" of theirs, but in the meantime, I have suspended buying anything from Prusa until we get some transparency around the issue.
RE: Australian Import Duty And Tax Charges Added To Everything In Prusa Store Prior To Checkout?
I feel the same. If this is here to stay I'll be looking elsewhere. I was going to upgrade my mk4s to a CoreOne for the same price as buying another printer because I don't need two printers. But it is now cheaper to buy a high quality core xy printer from another company with more features like active heated chamber and AI camera than it is to upgrade my Mk4s to CoreOne. I hope this gets fixed up.
RE: Australian Import Duty And Tax Charges Added To Everything In Prusa Store Prior To Checkout?
There are businesses like Amazon and Aliexpress that collect GST on low value goods. I assume because the exceed the $75,000 threshold ( see below ). If that is the case then Prusa will not be able to ship goods without GST in the same way Aliexpress charges GST on a $15 item.
. The Core One upgrade kit was a great example I got one with a camera for abut $997 and didn't have to pay GST.
However as others have said ( and I've also contacted Prusa) the uplift is more like 14%. I paid $59.99 ex GST for a Core One Camera , its now $75.99 inc GST ( 59.99 + 10% GST = 65.99) . PETG was $39.99 now $45.55 ( 39.99 + 10% GST = 43.99) , a PA Nylon sheet was $76.22 now $82.99 ( $76.99 + 10% = $84.69)
The response I got from Prusa is there is also duty - which is not true. There is no duty on electronics https://www.abf.gov.au/importing-exporting-and-manufacturing/tariff-classification/current-tariff However the response I got from Prusa is the extra uplift is from duty. I think someone just hit replky without checking.
If your business sells goods into Australia, you may need to charge, collect and pay GST to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).
GST is similar to Value Added Tax (VAT) or Sales Tax in other countries. The GST rate is 10% or 1/11th of the amount charged on a sale.
You need to register and pay GST if:
you sell offshore low value goods that are imported by a consumer in Australia, and your GST turnover from sales connected with Australia is A$75,000 or more in a 12-month period.
Low value goods are tangible goods with a customs value of A$1,000 or less. The customs value is the price the goods are sold for, minus freight and insurance from the place of export. Some examples of these goods may include clothing, books, cosmetics, shoes or sporting equipment.
What to do if this applies to you
When doing business in Australia, you will need to:
check if the value of your sales is equal to or more than A$75,000 in a 12-month period. If the answer is yes, you must register and pay GST on relevant sales
Paying GST on imported goods
The Department of Home Affairs collects GST on taxable importations. The GST payable is 10% of the value of the taxable importation.
The value of taxable importation is the sum of:
the customs value of the goodsany customs duty payablethe amount paid or payable to transport the goods to their place of consignment in Australiathe insurance cost for that transportany wine tax payable.
RE: Australian Import Duty And Tax Charges Added To Everything In Prusa Store Prior To Checkout?
I also found this when struggling to see why the mk4s kit is around 24% more expensive (it was under $1000 with the price decrease), now it's $1239.
Very disappointing, with free postage it was under de-minimis, now we need to pay $240 more to pay some commissions to a 3rd party for freight duty processing that isn't required? Different if Prusa is actually registered for GST themselves (which case it should only be 10%), however it seems that instead a 3rd party is being used is fully profiting off managing duty on transactions where it wouldn't be required.
Disappointed.
RE: Australian Import Duty And Tax Charges Added To Everything In Prusa Store Prior To Checkout?
It's unfortunate that there hasn't been any sort of official update for going on nearly 3 weeks. In the meantime, I've noticed that the MK4S > Core One conversion kit is now an extra $10 more compared to last week, up from $999 to $1009 (before shipping). This made me curious so I did a little bit of digging in the browser's network tab and found out a few things:
- The currency displayed in the store, using AU as a shipping destination, uses the original USD price of a product as a base calculation across all 3 currencies
- The new Global-E prices are rounded up to the nearest $x9 price (eg $1003 gets rounded up to $1009) at larger values
- The Global-E code recognises the existing USD > AUD exchange rate, but then charges it's own own rate instead - this is currently equivalent to 1.894 (rounded) compared to the 1.578 Global-E exchange rate
- This exchange rate and rounding is applied to both the product price AND the shipping costs!
In practice, this means that a new Core One L goes from it's original price of $1,665.74 USD + $185.75 USD shipping ($1,851.49) to a whopping $3,518 AUD. If we compare that to the currently listed Global-E USD > AUD exchange rate, this would instead be $2,630 AUD + $294 AUD shipping for a total of $2,824 AUD. Add the 10% extra to account for being over $1,000 and it comes to a grand total of $3,087 AUD.
This means that Global-E processing adds an additional $431 AUD cost to a Core One L, at a rate of approximately 31.6c extra per USD (a 13% addition!). As echoed in previous posts, this is disappointing to see as this wasn't an issue previously. I can understand that this potentially saves Prusa a few headaches, but it stiffs us as customers for the benefit of only not having an extra bill appear during shipping. At least remove the added rate from the shipping costs! That in particular seems completely unjustified.
Anyone can check the rates and information in their browser at the moment - just open the network tools, inspect element on the price (both product page and shipping) and you'll see 'data-bp' (base price), 'ge-data-original-price' and 'ge-data-converted-price'. The debugger tab has a 'GetLocalizeConfigurations' sheet that lists the 'CurrencyRate' and 'GeFactor' as well as the rounding rates.