international sales over $2500 (S. korea)

Recently I placed an ad for a AP180 . Quickly received an "I'll buy it" from an Amarter from S.Korea. I was reluctant to accept, but he offered additional consideration to help compenste for the extra hassles. Buyer would pay all customs and shipping expenses.
Turns out there were a few new (to me) hurdles:

1) have to obtain EIN from IRS
2) Verify buyer is not on one of four "do not ship to lists"
3) Shipment has to have "Shipper's Export Declaration" number from the "U.S Dept. of Commerce". The SED form HAS to be done online and requires training and passing a 35 multiple choice test. I took this test "cold" got 3 questions correct-FAILED.

Needless to say, doing all this for a one time sale would require more than a little additional consideration!Last year on an international sale did not have these as issues.

Question: Is the above possibly correct? Is there another way? Buyer seems legit.
Joe

Part of that health bill we didn't need to know the details of until after it was passed.

Enjoy

I've sold stuff to A-Marters from all continents except Antarctica, and I think:
1. You can use your SS if you're an individual
2. I don't think there's export control on most things here on AM--night vision goggles excepted.
3. What's that? Ne'er heard of it.
Major shippers these days have very intuitive online tools to prepare international custom forms. You can just log onto USPS.com and play with some of the international shipment forms just to see what they typically ask for. I wouldn't let a good lead go to waste just because of customs declarations. International shipping can often be a deal-killer, though. Many promising leads vanish into thin air when I sent them the Fedex shipping quote. For something like an AP180, it can easily be $1500 just to ship.
You may also want to check if Fedex/UPS provide insurance coverage appropriate for your AP180. USPS caps their coverage amount to as low as $500, depending on the destination.

FedEx and UPS will file the SED "form" (it's all electronic now) on your behalf for $10-$12. You will need to find the harmonized tariff code using their online shipping tools or you can go to Uncle Sam's site at:
http://hts.usitc.gov/

Shipping via the Post Office is a crap shoot for anything requiring extensive export paperwork. If you screw up, you are personally liable and can be fined, even for typographic errors.

Either you or the buyer could/should hire an import/export shipping brokerage company. I imported a custom scope from APM Markus Ludes January of this year. They handled everything, from checking the quality of the crating, picking it up at APM, trucking it to Frankfurt, doing all the paperwork correctly (I had to sign a few but my signatures only needed to be .pdf files I scanned and emailed). They also provided tracking datails down to telling me what specific flights it was on. And delivered it to the front door of my observatory at an appointed time.

You might want to suggest this to your buyer. It will cost him a few bucks, but he could have confidence that things will proceed nornally.

BTW, you might want to check with A-P on what type of lens cell you have. The lens on the A-P 155 EDF can be removed and replaced with losing collimation. Packing the lens seperately is safer IMO.

Good luck!

joseph badal said:

Recently I placed an ad for a AP180 . Quickly received an "I'll buy it" from an Amarter from S.Korea. I was reluctant to accept, but he offered additional consideration to help compenste for the extra hassles. Buyer would pay all customs and shipping expenses.
Turns out there were a few new (to me) hurdles:

1) have to obtain EIN from IRS
2) Verify buyer is not on one of four "do not ship to lists"
3) Shipment has to have "Shipper's Export Declaration" number from the "U.S Dept. of Commerce". The SED form HAS to be done online and requires training and passing a 35 multiple choice test. I took this test "cold" got 3 questions correct-FAILED.

Needless to say, doing all this for a one time sale would require more than a little additional consideration!Last year on an international sale did not have these as issues.

Question: Is the above possibly correct? Is there another way? Buyer seems legit.
Joe

Thanks for all the great input. I ended up going with fedex " International economy Freight". This was substantially less expensive than "Priority Freight". Not insured exactly, FEDEX calls it "Declared Value". The IRS now requires the USA shipper to have an EIN tax ID number( vs S.S.#), even as an "Individual", non-corporate entity. This was easy to obtain, online and toll free call. Fedex has a separate department- "Electronics Export Information department" that helps you fill out the AES form for $10. When complete you sign and fax back to Fedex and they email your shipment specific ITN number that they received from Department of commerce.
You do have to spend a little time looking up the B/HTS codes for the specific products you are shipping from the US department of Census. There are over 6000 such codes. Since March of this year there has been a new trade agreement between USA and South Korea similar to NAFTA, that has eased trade and custom costs for export of USA made products.
The export control classification number (ECCN), I obtained this from Astro-Physics. For telescopes it is EAR99.
A commercial invoice is also required. Fedx online system automatically generates this when you prepare your online freight airbill, and prints out in triplicate.
If you want your buyer to pay for shipping costs in advance, and you what an exact price, you have to take it to Fedex office first to weigh and measure dimensions, then get all you paperwork done, wait for check/wire to clear then ship. This assumes you dont have a well calibrated scale at home.
Now I am Just waiting for the wire to clear!
Thanks Again everyone. Joe