Letters of Credit

I am writting to the group to get a response to a problem I ran
into. I have been in contact with a manufacturer in China and I am
in the middle of negotiating the terms with him.

The product I am planning on importing is mechanical and may require
repairs over time, so I am requesting that he supply some
spare/maintenance parts as part of the order. He tells me he will
include the parts as part of the price of the saw in-leu of a
warranty, which he does not normally provide any warranty. I decided
to check with US Customs on this type of arrangement, and they did
not seem to think this was a workable arrangement. Customs, does not
think having an entry on the invoice marked spare parts/ no charge
would be ok. If it is not shown on the invoice, then the packing
slip or carton counts would be out of sync, and if noticed would be a
problem.

A second Issue that I ran into was that the Letter of Credit is
a "Credit Application", meaning it has to go through a credit
approval process that could take a week or more. I guess, I always
thought that the L/C was a simple application that you pre-paid. So
at this point, I am stalling the manufacturer, while I hope to
recieve an answer from customs and wait for the "Credit Application"
to be processed.

Tom Cusack
President
Woodwright Tools, Inc.

PS. A couple of free resources on importing that I found are listed
below. This is not a recomendation to use any of these, just good
sources of information.

http://www.bankofthewest.com/pdf/importer.pdf

http://www.bankofthewest.com/pdf/exporter.pdf

http://www.ponl.com/external_media/pdf_files/media.1018.0.pdf

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