Payment Information

Payment Methods Accepted:

Our online shopping cart will accept payments by Mastercard, Visa, American Express or Discover Card, or by PayPal.

We accept payment by check or money order to:
Blue Jeans Cable
3216 16th Ave W
Seattle WA 98119

Orders by Fax can be placed at (206) 284-2931.

Sales Tax and VAT:

United States:

For orders within the United States, we collect and remit sales tax in about twenty states. That list of states may change from time to time, because states keep altering their sales tax laws which set the criteria; as of March 2021, we collect tax in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. If you're wondering why we charge sales tax in all of those states despite not having any operations in the great majority of them, well, the answer is that there was a Supreme Court decision in 2018 in the case of Wayfair v. South Dakota which considerably broadened the power of states to collect sales tax by scrapping the "physical presence" rule. For reasons which are more complicated than we need to go into here, however, in some cases you may find that the rate we are required to charge and collect is lower than the rate that you pay locally.

Canada:

For orders to Canada, there are usually two options at checkout. If you choose to have your order shipped by Federal Express, we will estimate and collect GST, HST and PST at checkout, and we will then pre-pay these on your shipment so that the shipment arrives without any charge at delivery. If you choose a postal service method of shipment, we will not charge any taxes at checkout, but you may owe taxes upon receipt (or prior to receipt) of the shipment.

United Kingdom:

For orders to the UK, new rules apply in 2021. We are VAT-registered in the UK and we charge VAT on all orders shipping to the UK. On shipments under 135 GBP in VAT-exclusive value, no taxes will be charged on import, regardless of shipping method, and we will account for and pay the VAT when we file our quarterly return with HMRC. For shipments above that threshold, we ask that you select FedEx as your carrier; with FedEx we are able to have the import VAT charges attributed to us as the importer of record and billed to our account, so that you receive your package without being asked to pay anything. If we use postal service methods of shipment, we do not have any such method available to us and you will almost certainly face an invoice for VAT upon delivery, even though you have already paid us the VAT-inclusive price. If this happens to you, let us know and we can return the VAT which you paid us -- but the best practice is to just use FedEx, shift the burden of accounting and paying the tax to us, and thus avoid the issue entirely.

The Rest of the World:

For orders to most other countries, we are able to prepay VAT and duty in the same manner as is described for Canada, above: select FedEx International Priority as your shipping method, and any taxes will be added to the cost of your order at checkout. There are a few countries where this doesn't work; we have not, for example, been able to support this method to Brazil, Greece and Portugal, either because of difficulties with the taxing authorities in those countries or with the customs clearance processes that are available to us. We also offer postal service shipping to any country the USPS will allow us to ship to, but we have no method for prepaying VAT or duty in such cases so any taxes or fees which are owed will be payable by you on receipt.