Usually, when the total value of the imported goods surpasses a certain value, your customers will have to pay import duties.
That means, your drop shipped goods will be held by customs.
Your customer will usually receive a letter from the customs, asking them to pick up their order and revealing how much they have to pay extra. As you can imagine, this makes customers furious.
Luckily, I’ve only had this happen to me one time 
I had a customer who ordered a huge quantity of the same item and thus German customs held the item and contacted my customer.
She then sent me an angry email asking for a refund and complaining about the extra costs. Since that’s completely understandable, I apologized and refunded the entire order value and she was happy.
After that I did some more research. I found out that in Germany you have to pay import duties on any goods with a combined value above 22 Euros. That is the total value of the goods on AliExpress by the way. That has nothing to do with how much you charge yourself.
So if an item is $2 on AliExpress and you place an order for 30 of those items in the name of your customer, that customer’s total order value is $60, which means it will be withheld by German customs.
If I place 10 items in the name of the customer on AliExpress, the total value of the goods will be $20 which is still totally okay.
So how can you find out what the maximum item value is?
1) Use Google to research it
I actually found the information about the German import duties on Wikipedia. Just do some research for the country you’re drop shipping to and you’ll find plenty of information about it on the Internet.
2) Make some phone calls
Pick up the phone and make some phone calls. Research a hotline for the customs in the country you’re trying to drop ship to. Ask them what the import duties are. Probably this won’t be necessary since you can just find this information somewhere online.
Once you know the maximum allowed order value, you can simply break down bigger orders into multiple shipments. So if a customer orders 30 items that cost $2, just create three separate shipments.
Place three orders for 10 items each, so the total order value of every package is below $20. Then none of the items are held by customs.
You can also send out an email to your customer explaining this.
Just tell them that their item was split into multiple orders due to the high order quantity .And that packages might arrive at slightly different times. That’s a pretty easy solution for the import duties issue.
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David D.Y. Chang
Hi Till, I was wondering what if my customer sent order that costs over $20 per item to Germany?
Let’s say the order costed $30, what would I do then?
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