I understand that, but as a retail customer I am not used to two things: 1) not knowing the total price of the purchase when I make it; 2) paying for it piecemeal, first when making it and then a week later when it crosses the border.
I make nearly all my buying aside from food online, have done so for years, and this is literally the first time I'm dealing with that.
I think it's a fair practice to let the customer know the total price upfront. That's all I'm asking.
I hate to say it like this, but it is an unfair ask. Import tariffs are the responsibility of the importer of record and with the way they all change they would be opening them up to huge liability for mis-representing the actual costs that they don't know. It is VERY rare for most consumers to actually import things from out of the country, in fact it is actually against most companies distribution policies to export out of your region with consumer goods, including most of scuba gear. Distributors exist for a reason, and dealing with this kind of stuff is one of the main reasons that local distribution networks exist. This is why you can't buy branded Apeks parts kits in the USA, their dealership agreements forbid the export of those parts to the USA and several dealers that tried it 15-20 years ago from Europe lost their dealership when they got caught. The fact that they're willing at all to export to the US is something we should be grateful for as many smaller companies just can't afford the hassle to do it.
I'll give you that they should have warned about the expected processing fees from DHL, but it is entirely unreasonable for them to put that in their actual price, you are buying DAP not DDP, most people never have to even learn what those letters mean, but it's a big deal in international logistics and always has been.
Paid the god damned charge.
What is interesting, only $2.69 of that amount is the actual tax, and $17 is DHL's "duty tax processing" fee.
So, f..k DHL.
For the amount of work required that is actually a fairly small fee to charge, you can be upset about it, but it's a good bit of paperwork with MASSIVE legal repercussions if they screw it up, you can be upset at this all you want, but this has ALWAYS been the norm. The only thing that is different now is that the de minimis has been lifted, if you bought a regulator set from that country 10 years ago or even a year ago then you would have gone through the exact same process. Ali express is importing to themselves, they'll have set up a USA LLC or something that is operating the warehouse then they sell from their Chinese company to the USA company, pay the import tariffs on arrival, then distribute out, this is the way distribution has been done for hundreds of years, and if you want to import yourself directly, then you have to do it without the economy of scale that the distributors can leverage.
We have customers asking us right now for millions of dollars worth of orders what the tariffs are going to be, and we honestly can't answer that until the bills actually come in, we can get close, but we can't get exact numbers until that invoice arrives, saying that they know exactly what it will be is too risky for a business dealing with that small of a dollar valuation to risk anything going wrong so selling DAP is the least risk.
What is interesting though is that companies like Ali Express who you are praising are actually the reason that the de minimis was lifted in the first place and now that they have US distribution they are having to pay the tariffs they should have been all along, so it's a bit of a weird situation that we are finding ourselves in with companies like that. Companies like Scuba Gaskets are not something the government cares about, it's companies like Ali Express that were being extremely problematic and why they lifted that exemption. The irony being that the problem companies are big enough to setup their own distribution from the US with little loss to them but the smaller companies that were the reason it was put in place are the ones that suffer.
