Yeah I've had multiple shipments over $200 and never been taxed either.
It also depends on how it was classified on the form. “Gifts” and personal shipments are not the same as items marked “merchandise.” “Wholesale” is also different. If you ordered a 10 pack of SCART cables then your supplier may mark it wholesale regardless of your intentions.
The US Customs and Border Protection site says: “Note: Most personal shipments worth up to $800, and gift packages worth up to $100, will pass duty-free as long as the recipient does not receive multiple packages in a single day whose cumulative value is more than these amounts.”
https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/126/~/mail---goods-requiring-dutyWhat that tells us is that there are still thresholds for the other types as well even though you are significantly less-likely to cross them.
I’ve made personal orders before and had them arrive marked “gift” or with a mis-stated value without me requesting that, so what matters isn’t so much what you spent. It’s more what value the sender declared and how. A high-volume seller like Yamatoku can’t risk their business with illegitimate customs declarations, so they came up with this.
I got a Core Grafx II setup with some games shipped out a the end of last year, arrived here earlier this year and it was a $150 shipped bundle and no fee there. I imagine if there is a threshold it has to be probably notably higher doing a quick glance here and google. Maybe $500-1000 or more. Not really sure, but it sucks balls paying $14 on a 3oz GB game or a loose HuCard.
And that's not even getting into this guy having a couple shill bidding accounts too which is well known and documented on many gaming sites pissed at the seller. I was watching 3 games and a controller yesterday that ended and each one were low for awhile and all them got bid from the same user account kicking it up to a heftier value.
In all honesty, that’s how my bid behavior would appear when I am building up an order over a couple weeks. I watch all the upcoming items I’m interested in and attempt to win them with bid-sniping. Because I’m trying to pad my order with stuff that’s only worth it to me after the shipping discount, I’m generally not bidding high enough to win all of them.
Most recently I was getting a lot of the cheap non-Charcoal N64s for UltraHDMI (had a lot of kits to install an sell) and I added a bunch of NeoGeo stuff including duplicate titles for testing a Junk AES that I was fixing up. The second copies of Fatal Fury Special and SamSho II will be used with DiagROM and I also needed a shell for my flash cart. Only afterwards did I realize that I don’t need a shell for my DiagROM companion cart (only need one board from it too). I did not detect any kind of shill bidding as I got several of them for less than they were worth. Based on your description, I can see how someone interested in the same things but bold enough to bid earlier and offer more might assume my bids were Yamatoku shill bids.
They have a generous period to accrue items before payment so I spend a lot at once. This is why I only place orders with them every few years.
The past allegations regarding bid retractions to feel out your max bid and second-chance offers from suspicious accounts that outbid you seem pretty damning but, again, I haven’t encountered it with Yamatoku myself. It’s very possible that they were doing this for a time and stopped or that they only do it for particular items I haven’t bid on. Perhaps eBay put a stop to it but didn’t ban them. Giving one of their big long-term sellers some leeway when they might claim ignorance of the rules is something I can imagine them doing. They might have even invoked the “sorry-we didn’t know-we’ll stop” defense, bolstered by a language barrier.
