@kfn78 wrote:
Puerto Rico does not require a customs form. I have been shipping to Puerto Rico for years through USPS, PayPal, shipping-easy, etc with regular mail.
That's true, but what's been happening (as recently as last week, for me) is that the Shipping form will, for no apparent reason, make you complete a Customs form for a shipment to a Puerto Rican buyer before you can actually print your domestic Shipping label.
You can actually see if it's going to go wrong as soon as you pull up the Shipping form, with two clues that I've seen in my own experience:
- It will bring up the "Classic" Shipping form instead of the new Shipping form "Experience," apparently because they have not yet figured out how to do international shipping with their new form.
- The blue button at lower right will read "Continue" (to go to a Customs form) instead of "Purchase postage" (to buy the label and print it in the next screen).
You have to complete the Customs form as if you were shipping internationally to another country, but then when you complete it and finally get to your Print button, the domestic label comes out by itself, as normal, with no hint that a Customs form was ever filled out.
I had a theory some time back that this was a programming glitch caused by the software not recognizing the buyer's home country properly (such as by putting "Puerto Rico" in the country field by mistake), but now I'm wondering if it might be lumping the ZIP codes for PR in with the APO/FPO ZIP codes that do require a Customs form in addition to a domestic Shipping label, as those are going to military addresses that might be overseas. It looks as if there may be an incorrect decision behind the scenes that forces the user to go through an unnecessary Customs form, followed by a correct decision to not print the form that wasn't needed in the first place.
In any event, it seems to be a non-issue for PR shipments, since the Customs form never actually gets printed, and the package gets to my buyers just fine.
