Cafe Press is a company who produce branded/promotional items and print personalised logos for organisations like adders.org. These can then be purchased direct from our very own Cafe Press Charity Stall. Any items ordered from our Cafe Press Charity Stall will open in a new window where full details of the item and how to obtain this will be found. To order items from Cafe Press we have kept all costs as low as possible and the price you see is for the item - however, there are shipping costs added to orders and this is dealt with by Cafe Press direct and this works out at $7 for the first item and $4 for International Shipping.

Since ordering from Cafe Press ourselves we have found out that although the amount you see on the invoice to Cafe Press will show an amount for the items and also an amount for shipping. They also state if it is an International Order you may be liable to Customs Duty; Excise Duty; and VAT. for each item. You can check things out about Import Taxes and Import Duty at HM Customs & Excise

One amount that Cafe Press do not have any control over or information about on their site, is one which is made by the courier service UPS - Cafe Press say that for International Shipping they use DHL but we have found that DHL is only used for packages under 4lb in weight anything above this weight is shipped via UPS. What we have found however is that UPS add an additional amount of £10 per package as a brokerage fee which is payable direct to them on delivery along with the Import fees.

UPS charge this brokerage fee for paying the Import fees on your behalf when they collect packages once they have been through customs here in the UK. I have phoned a number of courier companies and all have said that they do not charge customers any form of brokerage fee, they calculate this into any shipping costs.

UPS have obviously decided that their shipping costs (even though these appear to be the same as many other companies such as DHL) is not enough for them, so when they pay the Import Duty Fees on behalf of a customer they have decided to charge the customer an extra £10 Brokerage Fee for doing this.

As I have said I have spoken to a number of Couriers and all those I have spoken to have told me that there are no additional fees on delivery to the customer apart from the actual Import Duties - I have tried to speak to UPS about this but so far they have not replied to my emails on this subject other than to say that the brokerage fee is to cover costs for them dealing with customs.

I will update this section if and when I ever receive a reply from UPS about this. In the mean time, as a rough guide, my order was a total of $110.53 with shipping costs of $67.00 - the amount I had to pay on delivery was £30.34 of which £20.34 was to cover the various Import Duty Fees and a further £10 for this brokerage fee!!