Iphone import HowNotTo

Posted January 5, 2008 at 7:50 pm by Eelco van Beek in General.

At Jitscale we try to do something fun every Christmas. This year we decided to surprise everyone with an iPhone. Not just good for phoning but also quite relevant, as the iPhone development environment is quite compatible for linking to our monitoring environment. So Marloes and I travelled to New York to buy 25 iPhones.

At preparing the trip we found out Apple only sells a maximum of 2 iPhones per person. According to Apple this is to give as much people as possible a chance to get one for Christmas. Just before we left, this maximum per person was raised to 5, due to increased production.  So that implied we could purchase a maximum of 10 iPhones. Not totally true; Apple’s definition of a person is a unique credit card accompanied by a person who can produce personal identification for that credit card. During our preparation, when the limit was still set to 2, we had taken this into account, and we had successfully collected 16 credit cards to be able to buy a minimum of 32 iPhones. Buying 25 iPhones turned out to be a piece of cake.

Then the whole bulk had to enter the Netherlands. Obviously it was our intention to do this the proper way and follow the rules of the import process. In preparation to this, our colleague Quintijn had made extensive phone enquiries at the business section of Customs. He was told we needed to follow the red line (?) at our arrival with the 25 iPhones, towards the customs declaration desk. There Customs could clear the iPhones. We would have to pay the VAT and then, at night during the Christmas dinner, we would be able to surprise our employees.

We landed at Schiphol Airport at 6:50 am. After a short wait for our luggage, we continued our way to the customs declaration desk. We were seen on site by a respectable customs officer. After having explained we wanted to import 25 iPhones, this man declared Customs does not deal with that. Since January 2007 this needs to be dealt with by a handling agent (someone who has been trained by Customs on entering goods into the Netherlands, something I didn’t know, but the customs officer explained this to us on the spot). I said it was a shame this appeared to be unknown information to the Customs Helpline where we had called for a reason!. He agreed this was indeed a shame, but his team leader did not flinch, even though it was in fact still possible for them to deal with the entering process themselves. To my remark “This does not really motivate me to declare goods in the future, especially as the fine is, in our case, nearly as high as the cost of entering the goods”, he said he didn’t really care one way or the other and that he was just following the rules. Which triggered my response in saying we were also just following the rules but their information help desk (Customs Helpline) follows different rules than their employees on the floor. A different customs officer, who felt for us, said we could enter the iPhones in a personal capacity, but the same team leader put a stop to that.

A solution would be to find a handling agent there and then on Schiphol territory, who could enter the iPhones. Tricky, as on Saturdays handling agents hardly ever make an appearance (later, I heard, on Sundays they do). While Marloes had to stay in the arrivals part of Schiphol, and Quintijn (who had come to pick us up) and me went looking everywhere for a handling agent, we were already hours into getting the iPhones across the border. After 5 hours and 50 minutes (Marloes was now at Customs and Quintijn was waiting in a handling hall for a handling agent) we had had enough. At 12.40 pm the iPhones were put in a safe and we left Schiphol to go to Scheveningen.

At night, at the presentation we were unfortunately unable to present the iPhones. The following Monday we received the iPhones through a handling agent (who helped us really well), and handed them out at the office.

I need to get the following of my chest: Customs, to me, comes across as really badly organised. Customs Helpline and the organization at site are not in sync and don’t seem to have things straight for these kinds of situations (when you ask which handling agent to call, you get a gigantic list, as they can’t express any preference. Then it appears there is not really a list, you need to get this list at the information desk at Schiphol. The information desk has never heard of a list of handling agents, etc.). I did appreciate the young customs officer who helped us initially; his will to bring things to a good ending for us, gave me a favourable impression of Customs. His team leader immediately killed this feeling.

The eventual agent who helped us, took excellent care of the transaction.

By the way, Customs came up with an amusing story themselves. Apparently there is a guy travelling back and forth between the US and the Netherlands to import iPhones. He doesn’t declare them (clever!) and occasionally he gets intercepted by Customs. With this occupation the guy pockets, according to Customs, about 18,000 Euro net per month.