|
In the mid-eighties, I came up with the brilliant idea of
importing exotic items from Thailand for resale in my country,
Canada. I had visited Thailand four times by then and was impressed
with the variety and quality of the goods on offer: pewterware,
ceramics, jewellery, wood carvings, paintings, statuary, spirit
houses, silk, spices, handicrafts, etc. There is an enormous
selection.
Before starting this venture, I signed up for a correspondence
course on import-export with a US correspondence school. This
was long before the Internet; today, on-line courses are available.
The course lasted six months and cost more than $300. One of
the things they talked about was that a Telex/Teletype machine
was necessary to send orders and receive confirmations and shipping
notices. This, I discovered, was obsolete information because
fax machines had completely replaced the clunky, noisy Teletypes.
I visited the Royal Thai Embassy in my city and met with their
commercial counsellor. He was most welcoming and very helpful
and had dozens of catalogues from Thai companies showing everything
from silk to sardines.
 I
took a few catalogues away to study and settled on a company
that produced jewellery and gift items made from real orchids,
dipped in clear acrylic to preserve them, then edged with 24-carat
gold. Beautiful, and unique... I had not seen anything like them
in Canada.
I contacted the company by fax, specifying the quantities
of items that I wanted, and requesting a "pro-forma invoice".
This is a document that can be used at Customs to allow for the
shipment to be imported, held in a secure area, taxes paid, and
then released. The correspondence course told me how to do this
and also told me how to find and engage the services of a customs
broker on my end to facilitate the process. His fee would be
about $100, quite reasonable for the amount of the order, which
was about $13,000 including $800 for shipping by air.
I did a telegraphic transfer at my bank to pay for the shipment,
and received confirmation by the company a day or so later, with
an expected shipping date.
About a month later, I got a call from the customs broker,
who had an office at the airport, that my shipment had arrived
from Thailand and it had been seized by Canada Customs.
"Why?" I asked. He said he didn't know as they had
just notified him and then quit for the day. It was exactly 5:00
PM, and being civil servants, they weren't hanging around.
Overnight, I worried about why my shipment of 1000 pieces
had been seized. Were the orchids infected with a disease? Was
the acrylic poisonous to rats and small babies? Was the gold
not 24-carat, but fake?
Next morning, I called Canada Customs and gave the female
officer who answered my manifest number (that I had obtained
from the customs broker) and asked why the shipment had been
seized.
"Because it's in plain white boxes," she said.
I was stunned into silence.
"That's illegal," she said.
The Thai orchid company had a variety of packaging available;
I had chosen a glossy white cardboard base with a clear acrylic
cover that displayed each piece very nicely. I had ordered 1000
pieces packaged in 1000 display boxes.
"Illegal?" I stammered. "Each piece should
be in a retail display box and there should be 1000 pieces."
"There's no company name and address on the boxes, they
have no wording whatsoever," she said.
"Yes, I have 1000 stickers here ready to be applied."
"Well, that's illegal. Canada Customs Regulations require
that the importer's name and full address be on the packaging
of every piece prior to importation."
"Oh," I said, "I didn't know that. I was planning
on putting my sticker on the boxes here after I received the
shipment."
 "You
can't do that," she said, "that's illegal. But since
it's your first time, I will allow it just this once. I will
release your shipment now, and then visit you in two days to
verify that each piece is properly labelled. In the future, if
any shipment is not properly labelled, we will either destroy
it or we will refuse acceptance and send it back to the originating
company at your expense. And in addition, you will be fined an
amount not exceeding $10,000."
Wow, these people don't fool around.
Anyway, I got my shipment, labelled all the pieces and two
days later, this same lady customs officer visited my house,
picked up three boxes at random to see if they had labels, then
filled out a form in quintuplicate that I had to sign, and left.
If you are interested in importing Thai products to your country,
take my advice and spend a little money on this eBook: Import Empire - Thai Imports Tutorial. It's
not expensive, and will save you a lot of hassle.
Here's a bunch of related resources (not Thailand-specific)
that provide useful information; all of these are written by
experienced people who have chosen to help newcomers by documenting
the things to do (and not do).
|