Shipped items/customs ...

Was finally glad to see an e-mail from sky2c, even though it gave us 2 day notice to head for customs at Whitefield location. Sky2C advised us to be there at 9:30am - thought it was going to be a challenge to reach there by 9:30am with the ITPL traffic. Even with the car, I knew there will be the overhead of finding the location, parking etc.

Left HSR layout at 8:15am - fortunately took the Varthur road, which goes to Kadugodi, where traffic was light after getting out of ring road. The location is right next to ITPL - a block down the road. You see a big board with CONCAR. There is a road right in-front of that board (there are 2 roads next to each other and you need to take the one right in-front of the board). You get this board as soon as you cross ITPL entry (when you are coming from Big Bazzar side).
                       
Once I got into sky2c office, there was some paper work -  handed over copies of US passports, OCI card, Indian passport etc + few signatures. A total of 10 mins of work and then wait until 10am for customs office to open. Along with Sky2C person, walked down to the customs place, crossing the container yard. Again, wait a bit more and the customs lady showed up and went thru' the packing list.
           
This is where I thought sky2c could have given better information - I provided the personal packing list, which was too detailed (as a reference list of our use). I could have possibly produced a shorter list which could have contained only the Electronics items I want to declare. Focus of customs folks is on Electronics items since rest of the used cloths, furniture, toys etc come under Transfer of Residence (TR). Electronics items do get duty - even if that second DVD player is a 10 year old one, it still gets higher duty. So, better to get a singe good DVD player and dump those old ones in US itself.
           
Customs person asked the helpers over there to open 10 to 15 boxes - many of the items we had were self visible like sofas, mattresses, computer table, digital keyboard, TV etc. One advise -- never leave the empty packing of items like iPAD, iPhone etc - they get their attention and they have to open up each one to make sure the actual items are not there. It is better to dump those boxes and carry these items personally when flying.
 

Using the packing list and the opened boxes, customs person came up with a number for the duty, which seemed pretty high in my case. After a bit of discussion about the items being used, it was reduced by a good amount. I did have the receipts for most of the items but not sure how much that would have helped - my Dell computer's vale was $3000 when I bought and now it would be $500 :-). But, safer to carry receipts anyway - they might help to prove that these are used items and establish the age of items.

           
Good thing I followed the timing given by sky2c -- I was there at 9:30am, was the first to get customs done and all done by 12 noon :-). sky2c said they would do the remaining paper work, using the original passport and the customs money that was already paid.

CONCAR Shipping Yard with containers stacked up

One more CONCAR pic..

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TODOs: Shipping...

This is where most of the help came from r2iClubForum - thanks R2I. R2I folks like us have shared a great deal of details there and every bit helped. We called several shippers - Universal, sky2c, air7seas being the few. The documents they sent across which had details on the process helped quite a bit - when you don't know the difference between FCL and LCL, you have to start from somewhere! Needless to say, our initial estimate and what we finally shipped were miles apart but getting idea on how much approximately we would pay helped in deciding what to keep versus what to dispose off.
 

Like everybody else, we thought FCL would work very well, if we can share with somebody. However, plans change and making it work all the way is a challenge. Unless you know for sure that your partner is going to stay with you all the way, don't plan to share. 

2 challenges here:
1) You don't know the exact volume until the last few days. With FCL, you need to stick to roughly 500 c. feet. With LCL, you go buy your individual volume and there is no limit on how much you can ship. What if your volume is more than 500 c. feet or your partner's volume is more than 500 c. feet. You always have the option of doing LCL on remaining volume but you will need to work closely with your partner to make sure you split evenly.
 

2) With LCL, you know that you paying for what volume you are using. Hence, you try to cut down as much as possible and ship only what you need. Trust me - you want to keep everything you have and it is not easy to let go, especially when you know that selling won't get you much and you are already used to those items.


Finally, we picked sky2c. For several reasons - several of my friends had used them and had good feedback, they had a office close to where I lived, when I called them, I did prompt responses and they were communicating etc. Initially, we went for FCL since one of our friend's were planning to move as well but they had to drop out and sky2c was able to move us to LCL.

Appreciate your feedback and comments, please leave a comment if you found this post useful (or not!) ...