Originally Posted by mikehillman89
Brokerage and duty are twoseparatethings.
Brokerage is a fee shipping companies charge for dealing with crossing the border with goods. Some places offer you standard UPS shipping, which looks cheaper, but then you'll get hit with larger brokerage fees. For example, my camera+lenses order would have incurred a $72.50 brokerage fee on top of the cheaper shipping, and when I ordered a 24-105mm, I would have been hit with a $67.95 brokerage fee on top of the cheaper shipping. The cheaper shipping options can turn out to be the more expensive. Anywhere reputable dealing with high cost items like cameras and lenses will likely only offer the shipping options that include brokerage, but you're best to double check. I hate Amazon.com because they've renamed the shipping options, so you don't know if you'll be hit for brokerage or not.
I'm sure FedEx offers shipping that doesn't include brokerage too. When I made my orders, at Adorama the UPS options would be $40-50, while the FedEx was $70-80. Since I knew the UPS had brokerage included, I took the cheaper UPS shipping option. It's not slow either, with the package arriving a day or two after it shipped.
Avoid USPS (US Postal Service), as high value cross border packages apparently disappear frequently, and there is no record of whether it reached you or not.
Duty on the other hand, is not affected by who's shipping or which shipping option you choose. It's a government mandated fee to help protect local industries, or to deter trade with countries the government has a beef with. Lenses and cameras are duty free. Filters have a 2.5% duty. There are dozens of long confusing PDFs over at the customs website take break down the fees for everything you could imagine.
Photoprice.ca includes the duty in their prices... see the pocketWizard here:
http://www.photoprice.ca/product/031...non-price.html
Click on the ? next B&H's final price. You'll see the 5% duty included.
Photoprice.ca has a page dedicate to duty/brokerage issues, which pretty much repeats everything I just wrote, but with phone numbers to customs and links to the relevant websites.
http://www.photoprice.ca/article/tax-duty-brokerage-demystified
And the final thing photoprice.ca takes into account for you is that credit card companies charge around 3% to do currency conversion, so they use that inflated conversion rate to show you what you'll really be paying. They mention that here:
http://www.photoprice.ca/exchange-rate/
In other words, for Canadians, photoprice.ca lists what you'll pay, including shipping, duty, currency conversion and taxes.
http://www.canonpricewatch.com/is the US version of photoprice.ca, but it only lists US stores, so it doesn't cover the case here of US people importing from Canadian retailers. It's new, so they may expand into that one day.
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