Hello fellow collectors/flippers/‘investors’, attached is a screenshot of an email from PWCC to me after I requested them to mark $50 on my package (the card inside is not $50) upon completion of my payment to them.
I am not sure when will this be in effect but this is not great news for international bidders that bid with them to avoid customs tax.
Before some people get in here saying ‘this is what they should have done in the first place because it’s illegal to mark low value’, I hear you and understand where you are coming from but as a buyer of anything, no one wants to pay extra if they have that option.
Just a little notice from a fellow collector/flipper/‘investor’ to another.
That’s a pretty big deal for international buyers, one of the big positives buying from PWCC was the low declaration - I wonder what caused the change.
They are advertising that as a cost saving method so buyers don’t need to pay potential sales tax for certain states. When this vault system was announced last year, I thought that they might remove the low declaration for international package moving forward to incentivize buyers to use their vault but after the vault system actually rolled out a few months ago, there was nothing indicating that.
Looks like they are going that route moving forward.
They probably got ripped on a lost international order.
By not having as many international bidders now, along with their horrible business practices, their items will go even lower and their submitters will shrink accordingly.
My May shipment from PWCC had the cards declared at full sold value. It cost me an extra $89 duty to arrive at my place in Canada. It was a bit of a surprise but won’t stop me from bidding on their auctions. I take that chance with other cards I buy from the States. Most times they arrived without duty. So if I get dinged once a month by PWCC, I’m ok with that.
That´s no good news. I bid almost every pwcc auction and won a good bunch of items (mostly MTG though) but this will ultimately prevent me from bidding there any longer. There may be exceptions but in general I fear that this will really hurt their sales. Highest-end (10k+) might not be affected that much as international buyers can still choose the vault. There might be no other way to acquire the card anyways, so import taxes are irrelevant.
I’m kind of amazed they even did this to begin with. I’m pretty sure it’s considered fraud to under-declare the value of something being shipped, especially if it’s going to a different country.
That is unfortunate. I will have to bid more conservatively now even though I was eyeing a lot of cards on the next block. This is good news for everyone else on eBay that sells graded cards internationally.
I was shocked that a business operating at this magnitude was able to get by so long. The dollar values and quantities we’re talking here had to be felony levels.
I don’t know how people don’t realize it but tax law is no joke. We export things all the time in my company and it is a massive no-no to underdeclare things. We have hoops to jump through when we are just transferring things to our overseas facilities to prevent paying tax on internal transfers as well as when we are just providing small free of charge samples of our products to our customers.
So if you won a charizard 1st Ed psa 10 for $30k (just as an example I know it’s worth a lot more) then they would then declare the value at what it’s worth ? So add an extra $10-15k ?
It’s good news for US buyers as well. We can be more competitive since international buyers now need to pay the full legal amount and don’t have an extra 20-35% to put on their eBay bids. Though many US buyers will be finding in the coming months they will be paying the full legal amount via eBay charging sales taxes too to the tune of 4-10% ish.
It doesn’t make sense to stop bidding there all together. Just bid less. It’s like saying I’ll pay $100 for that item but $95 plus $5 shipping is just too much.
Forgive my ignorance but the US doesn’t tax people on exports do they? If that’s not the case I understand why they’re declaring properly now, but if not, once the package has left the US what do they care?
@pierce the US has relatively friendly relationships with many other countries. Do you think Europe or Australia or anyone else would take kindly to the US allowing their businesses to aid citizens of those countries in committing tax fraud?
Also there are differing tax laws and situations when it comes to exporting certain dollar values that I am not remotely knowledgeable of. I know every time I export something I do it under the exemption that it is something like <$5,000 or so value or whatever that box is on USPS website. Over that needs some special permitting as a business or whatever that I don’t have and I assume has fees associated with it. There are probably more reasons why the US has interest in knowing the $ value of goods leaving the country but again I am ignorant of those, just aware that what they were always doing was quite high level and high volume tax fraud.
