My particular situation was: I bought some knife scales from a guy in Australia. I’m in the Netherlands. Etsy collects EU sales tax - 12 euros in this case. Now, Etsy is supposed to send that money to our customs people and the shipper puts a specific code on it to let them know that the taxes have been paid in advance.

Now, for whatever reason, Dutch customs taxed me AGAIN when the package arrived. Even though the seller had put the correct code on there and even highlighted it with a marker. So as far as I can tell, it wasn’t their fault that I got taxed twice.

But: Etsy specifically tells you to take things up with the seller first when there’s issues. And the seller refunded me the second tax payment (13 euros and change). Which was of course very nice of them. But I wasn’t about to take that double taxation lying down either. I’m very much in the ‘import taxes are theft and extortion’ camp, so I sure as shit wasn’t about to pay twice.

Whether he refunded it to avoid a bad review, I don’t know. But the whole thing annoyed me so much in general, I’ve stopped buying things on Etsy. God forbid I run into that issue if I ever buy anything actually expensive on there.