[rafaelm]

I understand where you are coming from, but most of the time that's the only way people that live in south or central America can buy stuff online at decent prices. It's cheaper for me to pay the shipping fees to my country than it is to buy stuff here.

I use a freight forwarder to do most of my online shopping through Amazon, ebay and lots of other stores. I've bought everything from phones, TVs and even a standing desk.

It's a huge industry here. If you go to any warehouse district in Miami near the airport you'll find a bunch of these companies.

As a sidenote, I did some small development work for a friend that owns one of these companies. He was running a smallish operation and was making some good money.

There's a couple of software solutions for tracking, billing, ,support and CRM for those types of companies and they are absolutely abismal. There, I gave someone a business idea :)

[cookie_monsta]

Somewhat unrelated, but when I first moved to Latin America I had a job that consisted of taking enormous, empty suitcases to Miami and spending a week buying to order at the clothing outlets and end of season clearance sales. The upper class Latinos who ordered the clothes obviously paid a premium (and wouldn't be caught dead in the very convincing counterfeits that were available in the local street markets) as the whole operation paid my expenses and "wage" and made it worthwhile for the guy who I worked for.

Later I freelanced, doing basically the same thing with laptops although I would limit myself to 5 per trip just in case the customs guys got curious (they never got curious).

The global economy is really screwy, particularly with import taxes factored into the equation. I still have friends who will buy insurance write-off cars in the US online, drive them south (often with an undriveable one in tow), fix them up (so that they are salable but not strictly roadworthy) and still manage to make a living.

Then there was the whole thing about Mexican gasoline (which is state subsidised) getting smuggled over the border and sold by roadside vendors by the gallon.

It really is the purest expression of the "free market" - any tiny arbitrage leads to a clandestine industry springing up. For a while there was a boom in smuggled fresh eggs.

[silisili]

That's really interesting, thanks for your perspective. I tried to be careful not to blame the buyers but the forwarders. From a seller's perspective, they are a pain, and leave us wondering when and if a product will be delivered. I once sold a nice watch that way, and paid a lot to insure it. About 2 weeks later, I get the shipment back with REFUSED scrawled on it. I offered to refund the buyer minus shipping fee, which then led to a big back and forth fight via ebay. I felt sorry for them, paying for nothing, but why should I have to eat that? In the end, I won but refunded half the shipping cost as a gesture of good will.

In any event, I'm curious why it's cheaper to buy things from the US? Is it to do with tariff wriggling, or is business locally that inefficient? In that I mean, it seems some local company would realize they could import say a thousand Iphones, mark them up slightly, and make money while being cheaper than you paying to ship a single one from the US.

[bruce511]

A combination of taxes, tariffs and an extra middleman.

If I buy an imported product here I pay local sales tax, import tariff (indirectly) and the overhead of a local importer/shop. If I buy on ebay, especially if its second hand, I pay little to none of that.

(actually, in practice, the govt here has figured it out and sales tax and tariff are usually collected on incoming shipments - stuff acquired in person overseas are more or less not paid. Depending on your country ymmv.)

But local importer & retail alone can add plenty to the overhead, and hence retail price.

Of course buying from the US this way is still very expensive, the real value is in buying direct from China.

[rafaelm]

Oh don't get me wrong, I totally understand your point as a seller. What's weird to me is that the seller gets blamed, even after the shipment is marked as delivered by UPS/Amazon logistics or whatever company was used to drop it off in Miami.

Unfortunately, I'm very familiar with the scamming culture around these parts as well:/

[rafaelm]

Regarding your question, I believe it's mostly down to corruption basically. Local businesses have huge markups because they have to deal with theft, paying off customs officials even if they have all the paperwork etc as well as the taxes. As others have mentioned, these freight forwarders have figured out ways to get around that, probably with more bribing, not paying import taxes etc. It's a never ending corruption cycle and the customers are part of it.

[borissk]

Yeah, but most of these operations declare the goods as low value gifts to avoid paying customs and taxes in the destination country. You get a good deal, but then the government doesn't have enough money to run hospitals, schools, roads, etc.

[raverbashing]

"the government doesn't have enough money" because politicians liberally help themselves to public funds, that's why

And you can be sure that it's the friends of the government that does the most egregious import tax dodges

[KennyBlanken]

If you rely on these forwarding companies, you should tell them that them participating in scams is hurting your ability to do business with them.

I doubt they care. The companies are probably mostly run by organized crime.