Is it normal to pay nearly 100% for duty tax?

[Adagio_Leopard]

I ordered my BF a wallet from The Ridge.
They advertise worldwide shipping which is bullshit if you read in their TOS they only ship to certain countries.

Anyway I used MyUS to get it shipped. And today Amarex told me that I had to pay R1800 for some reason I don't know what for but I assume it's duties and taxes.

This is what the wallet cost (R1808) Is paying 100% normal for duty & taxes?? That's ridiculous!
Is there any way I can dispute this?

 

[Phokkit]

You should definitely query it, your duty rate and vat should come to R800 - R900

 

[Adagio_Leopard]

You should definitely query it, your duty rate and vat should come to R800 - R900

I sent an email and I'm waiting to get in contact with a rep on WA.

I expected duty tax but not 100% the value. That's a bit much.

 

[Badsector]

If Amazon sells the product, you can check their estimate for Importing fees

 

[PlanK69]

i've bought a R3000 phone from india before, and my duties were R500 on it (which is still great since the phone was R4300 at that time in south africa). paying 100% is absolutely insane imo

 

[Phokkit]

I sent an email and I'm waiting to get in contact with a rep on WA.

I expected duty tax but not 100% the value. That's a bit much.

Customs value + 10% R1800 + R180
Duty 20% R1980 + R396
VAT 15% R1980 + R369 + R357.9

So it shouldn't be more R933.9

 

[Scrooloose]

This seems excessive. Import duties on some items are higher than on others, for example items of clothing carry nearly 100% import duty. Something to do with importing stuff that has a local manufacturing equivalent. But I can't imagine a wallet qualifying as a clothing item.

Wife and I used to get band merchandise from Germany, but then the duties were increased from 30% to 100% and we stopped bringing stuff in.

 

[Adagio_Leopard]

So they calculated the duty tax at a much higher price than we actually payed.
We paid 97USD total. They decided it was 150USD.