Hi all,

I’m not sure if this is the correct group to be posting in, so if anyone knows of a better one please LMK.

I’ll attempt to keep this short: I work in admin at a large design firm in the US. We do commercial interior design, graphic design, architecture and landscape architecture.

We often ship layout palettes to clients to review/provide feedback on before final selection. Samples range from flooring (carpet/LVT/etc), countertop (stone/quartz/etc) paint, wall covering, fabric - essentially anything and everything interior design related.

The majority of packages we send out are domestic, as most of our clients are within the US. However, we’ve now had 2 clients with HQ outside of the country (England and Canada) and have needed to send samples there.

The shipment to Canada was the most recent, and that arrived on time without any issue. However, everytime I have shipped to England the package has been stopped and held indefinitely at the border.

I have a theory that the main issue behind this is that I am shipping these products from a corporate account to another company, therefore triggering customs agents to assume that there is a sale taking place that has not been correctly documented. I have always made it very clear in my customs documents that these are free samples being shipped for no resale purpose, as well as listed out each item contained in the box - to be honest, I don’t know how much clearer or in depth I can be.

Does anyone have any advice on how to approach this? I have called Fed Ex multiple times for help with this issue, and even brought it into a location in hopes that they will add something that I may be missing. Each time, I’m told that everything seems correct on their end, and to write a letter to the border to explain the situation. This has usually worked in getting it released, however I already included an almost identical letter in the original package!!!

I have only been provided a further explanation once - after the package had been held for weeks, and I wrote a letter explaining the contents, they told me that the declared value was too low. I had set the value at $0.00 (because it does not cost us anything to receive these samples; they are sent by the sales rep for free, at no cost to us or to the client - I’m not even sure how to declare a valid cost, because they are individual “pieces” of the whole item for sample use only). They told me to set the value at $50.00, and once I set that value/paid, they released it and it was delivered (many weeks after having shipped it from our office).

If anyone has any advice at all, please comment!! I’m desperate to figure out how to navigate these shipments in the correct way so clients can receive these packages on time. We have been weeks late on deadlines due to this issue, and Fed Ex has offered NO help!!