Import taxes kill the LED shoot-out

morten

morten

Well-known member
A sad day for the advancement of LEDs as light sources for videographers:

After 3 months of battling with Canadian customs and other red tape agencies it has become evident that our planned on-camera LED shoot-out will most likely never happen. Why you ask? well, to get the lights shipped to us in Vancouver, Canada, we have to pay full purchase tax on all lights even if they are demo models and will be sent back. to make matters worse recovering the taxes will take close to 6 months if the applications go through (and they don't always go through) which means we would have to shell out close to $600+ in taxes alone just to perform the test.

Unless someone has an ingenious way of circumventing this moronic issue we have to abandon the whole project. Truly a great loss for anyone and everyone who has any interest in the advancement of video light technology.

Smilies cannot express how upset, annoyed, frustrated and desillusioned we are over this meaningless setback.

mor10
 
We send quite a few orders to Canada.
To be honest, I wasn't even aware that our Canadian customers were charged import duties/taxes on their purchases.
Is there a threshold after which the customs agency assesses taxes/VAT/GST?
 
the problem is that any item worth more than..... $1100 canadian MUST pay some sort of weird extra import tax because it's so expensive. Doesn't apply to VidLed and the Varizoom but does apply to the Zylight and the LitePanels etc etc etc... very frustrating

mor10
 
Hey guys, I'm over in the Bahamas and we fall under the same umbrella of commonwealth countries. The custom duties on film equipment, lights etc. is ridiculous. I brought a Mole light kit from the states, and had to pay the Bahamas customs 75% of the cost price, in import duty taxes. That really sucks, i can certainly relate to what you guys are going thru.
 
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I know that if a package is declared as a gift, that eases some restrictions - see if you can do that
 
FiddlerMD said:
I know that if a package is declared as a gift, that eases some restrictions - see if you can do that
Click to expand...
Yes, i have done that before also, what happens then is that customs has a book, that they refer to that gives them a base value on the item. You then pay customs duty according to that base price............
 
Morten,

Zylight is made in the USA and is NAFTA-certified to remove import duties. To our Canadian customers we send our NAFTA certificate which they submit to their brokerage agent. I'm sure the other USA-manufactured lights in the shootout would be entitled to the same exemption, have you looked into this?

If you still find the cost of testing the Z50 to be too high, we'll be happy to share some of the financial burden to keep this shootout on-track.

Jim Collias
Zylight
www.zylight.com
 
Good news Everybody
prof200.jpg



Looks like I might have found a way of cutting away some of the red tape so barring my total misunderstanding of what the customs people told me it looks like we're back in business!

more info to follow in a couple of days.

mor10
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