Is buying from overseas even worth the hassle — need advice

amsterdam_pete said:

International shipping tracking for cross-border ordering orders: my experience with customs in the US when ordering from overseas: Package cleared…

Pushing back on amsterdam_pete here. Import rules are jurisdiction-specific and this board keeps giving US-shaped answers to non-US questions. What is a personal-import allowance in one country is a controlled-import offence in another.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. Practical: whatever you change, write down the date and the reason. In three months the reason is what you will have forgotten, and the reason is what makes the record worth having.

mike_nyc said:

Import rules are jurisdiction-specific and this board keeps giving US-shaped answers to non-US questions.

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. Take it one variable at a time. Almost every unanswerable question in these threads is unanswerable because three things changed in the same fortnight, and no amount of subsequent argument can untangle them after the fact.

Following on from Dr.PulmRoch — and this may be the naive question:

How would you tell the difference between that and the alternative explanation?

Reporting back.

Reporting back with a partial result, because a partial result is still better than silence. Two of the three things suggested helped; I cannot separate them and I am not going to pretend otherwise.