Here's a tale about shipping from Europe. A year ago, I purchased a high priced item from France. I had not dealt with the dealer before. He shipped it to me FedEx. As I recall, the label stated the year of the helmet (1896) but did not say "antique" or "over 100 years old". When it arrived at the FedEx center in Tennessee, they contacted me to say that I must pay a federal import tax for anything over $5,000 U.S. It was a couple hundred dollars. But worse, I had 3 days to pay before they sent it back. There was no time to argue about the "antique" status, so I did.
Not the end of the story. Ten months later, my State notified me that I owed sales taxes on it at 6.23%. They said that the Feds had notified them that I had made a purchase on which I might owe taxes. The short story was that I was now labeled an "Importer." My State doesn't care if it's an antique either. Plus there were 10 months of non-payment penalties accruing, of which they waived 85% of them. But I had to use 2 State computer systems that didn't talk with each other. Et cetera, blah, blah blah.
Lesson: it pays to work very closely with international vendors. Especially if they aren't familiar with shipping intricacies (and tricks), like certain German and British dealers are. It seems that if you can dodge the Feds, your State won't know.
[Side story: because of a foul up, the vendor was going to send my beautiful helmet to the U.S. Virgin Islands, not the mainland! Thanks to Google translator, my rusty French, and my hound dog librarian's nose in finding his personal phone number, we got that straightened out]
Vashka