Dammm thats sneaky
A very helpful post (and I respect your honesty too)
It’s the VAT issue that many sellers are confused about. When I communicated with DV247 they said it wouldn’t be an issue, but then they charged VAT on the item in the UK, but it was to be shipped from Germany, and therefore going to incur VAT for a second time, plus the other tariffs as you described perfectly. So I just cancelled my order. Another friend bought something at the same time from them, and did indeed get charged twice and they told him to contact customs and sort it out with them, which was rather tiresome and as to be expected he got nowhere with it.
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Yeah, dealing with sellers and couriers, frustrating as it can be, is certainly waaaaay more preferable than trying to deal with UK customs. I can’t imagine that would ever end well.
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Yes Christian from Elektron is an absolute star and sorted things out for me as well with tricky post brexit repair mailing issues.
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I havent a clue what going on in the UK at the moment. Nobody seems to know any legislation.
I’d send him some beer or something, but as I’ve so ably demonstrated, it probably wouldn’t get to him anyway.
It’s pretty simple from a legislative point of view. Goods coming in from the EU are treated the same as good from any country with which we don’t have a free trade agreement (which is currently pretty much all of them). The problem is that, if I buy something from America, the store is not charging me tax on it, so I’m only going to be paying VAT when it gets to the UK.
The problem is increasingly looking like companies in the EU charging VAT on items they shouldn’t be.
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I have an Isla S2400 on the way from Florida. Customs quoted me £175.
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Seems about right, assuming that’s VAT and duties?
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Yeah, it should be 20% of what you paid.
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Do i pay the UPS driver or someone else?
Well when I had a UPS coming in that I owed fees for, the website to pay was broken, but the guy on the phone said to pay the driver.
Problem was the driver didn’t have any method for taking payments, so I paid over the phone in front of the driver, took about 2 minutes.
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Hopefully it will be easier 
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Yeah, good tip from @Fin25. They’ll take cash but that’s it’s sadly. The amount payable should be on an email from the courier. If you’ve got it ready in cash, happy days.
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and that’s exactly the issue. It’s obviously illegal to charge VAT twice, but as the customer you are frequently left trying to sort this out or just to accept paying 40% extra on items. Which is just absurd. Hence my caution about shopping with companies that aren’t transparent. Thomann are very clear about how this works for example, whilst DV247 and Bax both trade in an often deceptive way sadly.
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Aren’t Thomann and DV247 owned by the same company? I thought they’d bought DV247 out a couple of years ago
No, they were bought out by the German music retail giant, Music Store GmbH some years ago. I had friends working for Digital Village at the time who were left thoroughly confused. Well worth reading this story
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One ‘positive’ - ordering esoteric synths or modules direct from the US is now no more prohibitively expensive than ordering from nearly anywhere else 
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Second positive - ordered some eurorack cables from Scapesound/PolarNoise. Used to be UK based bur relocated to NL because of Brexit. Cables arrived in 4 working days by PostNL with the same postage charge as I used to pay from the UK. Win!
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I’d imagine UK stores are having a boon now Thomann is out of the equation, for most buyers at least. There’s still things that they sell that we can’t get elsewhere, but i’m glad I stocked up on Cordial cables before the ‘conscious uncoupling’ (as a couple of new age celebs once described their divorce)…