Gifts from NZ and International Duties/Taxes

New Zealand has a pretty enlightened regime when it comes to customs duty, there are very few categories of products that are subject to import tariffs (duties).  The threshold for the imposition of GST only kicks in when the value of the goods would have a GST component greater than $NZ60, less than this and the cost of collection is deemed to not be worth the extra revenue to the government.

This may change, according to the customs website "Customs, Inland Revenue, and Treasury are currently looking at whether it is feasible to collect GST from overseas online purchases. A discussion paper outlining a range of issues related to online shopping and options for collecting GST is being developed and will be available for public comment later this year.  The Government does not currently collect GST on lower value goods for practical reasons – the administrative costs would be higher than that GST collected. A 2011 review found it was not cost effective to collect GST on items under $400. But if improvements can be made to the way goods cross the border and GST is collected, then the threshold at which benefits of collection outweigh the costs may decrease."

All very well if you are importing goods into NZ or purchasing gifts for friends and family in New Zealand from overseas this Xmas but using a NZ based supplier.

Problems with duties can arise when people order items either for themselves or as gifts from NZ to be delivered to countries with murkier or more oppressive import regimes.  Nobody wants the gift recipient to be landed with the hassle and expense of paying for the privilege of receiving your gift at Xmas! NZ Post has a very expensive product that can be added on to their already pricey Express International Courier service called Delivery Duties and Taxes Paid (DDTP) that "gives you the option to have duties or taxes incurred for parcels charged back to your New Zealand Post Account – this can reduce delays and ensure you pay rather than the recipient." Useful but prohibitively expensive at this time.

NZ Customs Declaration Form

Nearly all gifts NZ Fine prints send outside of NZ use the green customs declaration form for parcels up to 2kg (each print weighs about a 100gms) and are marked as "gift".  No matter what a customer asks us to declare at checkout time we have to itemise the contents of the package at the correct value. It's the law!

However there are a couple of things we can do to help your parcel get through without attracting duty at the other end.

1. The sheer volume of Xmas mail to countries like the US and UK means that not every parcel is going to attract the attention of customs.   Non-commercial mail is often treated more leniently, so we can hand address the parcel AND use your name and address as the sender rather than "New Zealand Fine Prints" or "Prints.co.nz" if the value of your gift is over the threshold.

2. The other option is a gift voucher - these are sent via email or post and the recipient will be able to receive the full value of your gift without customs being involved.

In practice the rapid growth in online sales coupled with the impossibility of screening every package means that nearly all gifts sent by us are delivered without attracting duty at the other end. Australia has an uncommonly lenient regime which is a huge bonus for New Zealanders sending gifts to the one place that has more kiwis than any other country outside of NZ - if your gift is under $AU 1000 there is zero duty or GST going into Australia.

NZFP's gift voucher research results

When a newly married couple who had been given two $200 gift vouchers for their wedding present visited NZ Fine Prints to redeem their vouchers they happened to casually ask Ben what was the most common voucher value that we sold for wedding presents. It wasn't a statistic that we actively measured and it sparked a debate as to whether customers purchased vouchers of different amounts for different occasions - and what was the average value of the gift vouchers we sold anyway?

Customers have been able to buy email gift vouchers (pictured at left) through Prints.co.nz since the mid 1990s and traditional postal gift vouchers have been sold by NZ Fine Prints for longer than anyone working here now can remember (given that prints are the perfect arty gifts from NZ we have been delivering the physical prints as gifts since the 1960s).

It didn't take us long to realise that it was impossible to determine what gift occasion the vouchers were being purchased for - we might have been able to work this out for each separate voucher by analysing the messages sent to the gift recipient but A) We don't retain the gift message on file and B) this wasn't appropriate privacy wise as the information would not be collected for this particular purpose!

However we have worked out our most commonly given gift voucher/certificate is for $100 (although Stats 101 is a long a time ago for this writer we think this number is called the mode). The average amount over the last ten years has been a gift of just over $80, although we can see trend for higher value vouchers over this time - probably simply due to inflation or perhaps the higher value of prints that we now stock (our average sale amount has actually trebled over the past ten years). We sell the most gift vouchers in the two months leading up to Xmas, however January is also the season for weddings in NZ so the month after Xmas is also pretty close to pre-Xmas levels. As an aside paper is the traditional first wedding anniversary gift - something that we are yet to work out a good marketing campaign around (and we have been thinking about this gift buying occasion for years) but many newly weds are already aware of this tradition without our help! We think the neat thing about the couple's choosing a print as their first anniversary gift is that it is a purchase that can be made for both of them and the decision made together, it's an present they can choose together and give it to themselves so they can both enjoy it equally...

There is an almost even split between vouchers being delivered via email and by post. In fact over 2011 we have delivered around 60 postal gift vouchers for every 40 email ones, it seems an email voucher is great when you have left buying the gift to the last minute but a physical voucher through the mail (or at the presentation) is simply a more tangible gift.

And the answer to the question that we asked most often by people buying gift vouchers....the average time from delivery to redemption is just 15 days!

Xmas Gifts - NZ Post Delivery Dates

It is the time of year that we get many print buyers asking us about the mailing date cut-offs for prints being sent as gifts to addresses outside of NZ by Airmail.  Each year we keep our shipping page updated with the latest information coming up to Xmas (although Airmail may not longer guarantee delivery after certain dates we have other options like international courier).  Official mailing dates from NZ Post are as follows:

• International Airmail outside of Australia and the Pacific 30 November
• International Airmail to Australia and the Pacific 6 December

In practice because most people send their gifts within the guidelines set by NZ Post we find that gifts shipped a few days after these official dates are still delivered by Xmas day due to lower volumes of mail. 

NZ Delivery: This year Xmas gift delivery throughout New Zealand for our standard shipping charge is guaranteed for all orders being shipped right up to the 21st of December - and we can deliver by courier after this date as well.  NZ Prints also deliver gift vouchers by mail right up until nearly Xmas eve - and email gift vouchers are still being bought on Xmas day itself.  If you have any questions about Xmas delivery please call us on 0800 800 278.