[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.