No nothing that I could see from GF, just FedEx.
The support team has been in touch and their logistics crew is sorting it out.
Will post the details of what satisfied Australian Customs when it’s all sorted so that if others have this trouble they know what to provide ahead of time.
Excellent! Thanks for following up and letting folks know it’s being handled.
Thanks benjibuls. Glad to hear you are getting it sorted and will share the info for the rest of us. Hope you enjoy using it and I look forward to seeing some of the things you make.
As per benjibuls, I’m in the same boat, I received email from FedEx stating that I need to supply a commercial invoice, that was never sent as part of the purchase, for Australian customs clearance for the printer to be shipped on.
I intermediately emailed hello@glowforge for the invoice, that was last Friday and as of today, Wednesday, I still have not heard or received anything from Glowforge.
I spoke with FedEx on Monday, and they said that they have also tried to contact and request the invoice directly, I just spoke to them today and they have not received anything back yet.
I have just sent another email to support@glowforge in the hope that I may get a response from there.
This is pretty poor of Glowforge and just adds to the disappointing customer service that all international purchasers have experienced over the years.
If the printer gets returned by FedEx due to this I will be rightly ticked off!
The other thing to note for Australian purchasers, when I spoke to the FedEx agent, she informed me that the commercial amount of the printer currently equates to AU$9000, at the time I ordered the exchange rate was far better and the price I paid was only around $7500, so any bonus we get in the sense of the “gift” card in the shop is reduced in excess customs fees in the 4 year wait given that customs duties will be calculated at current exchange rate on a four year ago purchase.
You might want to see this, posted earlier today:
Hey all,
So I’ve been chatting to the Support & Logistics team and they’re sorting out all Aussie shipments at once. No one should have issues with customs from here on in. They’re directly liaising with FedEx/Customs here to make sure the documentation meets requirements. My shipment has been cleared as of a few hours ago and I’ve just paid the duty on the GF and it should be in my hands with any luck on Monday/Tuesday.
The Logistics team now know what they need to do so hopefully this shouldn’t be an issue for any future orders. Exchange rate changes and all the duties ended up being smaller than I was originally anticipaced. For my GF Pro it ended up being $1303AUD whereas last time I calculated it (a year or so ago) it was something closer to $1600AUD so I’m not sure if things have changed in the duties. But at least it wasn’t as high as I was expecting.
Good luck Troy, hopefully the GF team should get yours sorted very soon too.
We’re you a pre-order? The duty etc sounds a lot higher than I was expecting ($700 ish)
Tom
Yeah I was a really early pre-order. One of the very first.
My daughter wasn’t born yet when I put down the cash. She’ll be 5yo in December.
I’ve ordered a pro + a filter. It will be significantly less if you got a regular GF.
Ahhh, the filter… we didn’t get that… just a pro
(Someone in the fb group in Melbourne got their pro last month with a customs/fedex bill of $670 I think)
Tom
Really. Interesting. My filter hasn’t come yet of course as its not ready so I wonder what the difference was for the import duty.
@RyanArt do you know at all why that might be?
Just curious - how did you get in a year before the kickstarter campaign?
It was in 27/09/2015 my bad. It was 4 years ago.
But it wasn’t a Kickstarter it was a pre-order campaign run by GF.
This was the breakdown posted on Facebook, if GF provided the full invoice to fedex (including the filter), you may be getting charged the duty on that as well?
My invoice from FedEx…
Duty $ 563.46
GST 143.02
Customs Electronic Entry fee 83
WET Charge $0
Quarantine Fee 0
TOTAL 646.46
Hmm, I suspect then that they didn’t remove the items that weren’t shipping from the invoice. @dan would you be able to chime in on that. Because right now it looks like I’ve paid nearly double for the import duties compared to others. Which is odd.
Yeah, that’s the way it looks… duty/gst should be roughly 10% of the total cost+shipping at today’s conversion from USD… at least if you pre-pay the duty you shouldn’t have to do it on the filter as well, you just have to do more paperwork to prove it later…
T
I meant to post an update earlier but I had to leave for Sydney to spend the week (finally got the glowforge and had to leave )
The invoice issue got sorted from the Glowforge end, so FedEx released it and I was able to go and pick it up (as I wasn’t going to be home to receive it the following day)
For me the customs duty totaled $1170 and from the commercial Invoice it was only for the items shipped, I have ordered the filter as well but that wasn’t on the invoice, it is interesting that there seems to be a difference in the customs duty costs, I have the GF Pro as well??
The unit arrived in very good shape and I had it up and running in under an hour and one print/cut performed with no issues, I am very impressed with the first print I must say, seem the wait has been worth it.
So happy your patience has finally been rewarded. Happy forging!
This is great news! So happy for you! Many of us still remember that first excitement and nothing quite compares.
Your long suffering is over. Welcome!