Hi All, We are planning to return to India in June 2012 and ship new Ikea furnitures as well. I want to know your experiences of shipping in container . Rules about customs, whether is it really worthwhile to ship new furnitures to India etc. Ladies, your comments are awaited.
I think that only used furnitures (2 years old or more) are tax free. So if you bring furniture in original boxes, then they will tax you. Not sure of the tax rate, but they will use it to milk more bribe from you. We repackaged most of them. We brought just the glass doors and such in original packaging and sure enough he added it to the list of taxable items. Ikea furniture has lot of small parts, so we put them in our boxes. We wrapped the long panels in comforters (hunt the yard sales/craigslist).
You will have to pay duty + give the customs a bribe for sure...but some of the ikea products are really worth shipping , the imported quality you find in India is very mediocre , so don't feel upset with the procedures - thats India for you
Hey Priya When did you ship and where? What problems you faced? Can you shed some light on this? Thanks
Hi Vandana, Our shipping experience is in the various replies I posted in this forum. Sorry it is scattered among different threads but they are all there. So if you have any specific questions, I would be happy to answer
So, priya, did you purchase any of IKEA furniture? Did you need not show any receipt to the customs as you told they were used and old furnitures?
We purchased two items from Ikea. One has like 7 foot glass doors. So we brought it in original packaging and declared it as new. He did not ask for receipts for anything. He took whatever value we declared, but these people know the cost of things. They even have catalogs and such with them. But we had the receipts with us for big ticket items thinking that it will be useful if they value something too high. I guess it applies more for electronics as we might buy things quite cheap with all the deals and such. Anyway they didnt ask us, so did not use it. Oh, did you know that paper rolls are taxable at 35%? We naively used them as packing stuffers. As we had furniture pieces in boxes, we put only a few for weight constraints and threw in two rolls to fill up the space and to protect the pieces from moving around. The customs officer said that such high quality paper napkins cost a lot in India and hence he must tax us.
Oh such valuable information. Thanks Priya. What we are thinking is to have 20 feet container, with our new IKEA furnitures as well as our used furnitures. Perhaps we have to repackage/ semi-assemble our new IKEA furniture so that we can avoid customs on that. So, u repackaged all new furniture except the glass doors and only those in new package were charged customs right? So did u load in 20 feet container? How much does this container accomodate? Since, you have been thru all this, i am bothering you with so many questions. Thanks
