I hear you about those fees. FedEx does the same. I got an invoice from them 2 months after I received the item, claiming import fees that were almost the value of the item. There was no fighting it.

I used to buy a lot from Niagara Cycles online (their store is just across the Canada/US border), but after they decided to not USPS anymore when shipping to Canada, I had to stop buying from them.

Now I see a lot of eBay vendors charge import fees upfront, promising you won't get any further import charges. I hope that practice doesn't catch on. As it is now, when using USPS I have only been charged import taxes twice in a whole year (getting 8-10 bike-related items from the US every month).

Even if no import tax is charged, the customs brokers working for UPS, FedEx, etc., still charge a fee, some misc items, and then sales tax on the fee and the misc items. So in those cases you pay the broker just to be told no import taxes were applied. Unbelievable.