Chile Forum

I am currently in Peru and planning on heading to Chile next week. I recently broke the lens on my Nikon D90 and am trying to buy a replacement cheaply. I am looking at a few options:
1: Are there places in Iquique that sell nikon lenses cheaply in the Zona Franca? The official nikon store will be expensive, but it seems like there might be cheaper resellers. I also read if you buy more than $500 you can go into the wholesale section for much cheaper prices, any info on this as $500 is pretty easy to spend on lenses.
2: Shipping to general delivery in Santiago. Would I be able to skip import dutys because I will have recently arrived on a tourist visa, thus saving me a lot of money? Any suggestions on which company to use to ship from the US?
Thanks

Isn't it possible to buy duty free in Peru?

There are certainly a variety of shops selling camera equipment in Iquique (mall Zofri is the name, from memory) which should be able to help as long as you want something fairly standard - I had trouble finding a uv filter for an old telephoto lens with a 63mm (?) diameter, for example.

cyclist wrote:I am currently in Peru and planning on heading to Chile next week. I recently broke the lens on my Nikon D90 and am trying to buy a replacement cheaply. I am looking at a few options:
1: Are there places in Iquique that sell nikon lenses cheaply in the Zona Franca? The official nikon store will be expensive, but it seems like there might be cheaper resellers. I also read if you buy more than $500 you can go into the wholesale section for much cheaper prices, any info on this as $500 is pretty easy to spend on lenses.
2: Shipping to general delivery in Santiago. Would I be able to skip import dutys because I will have recently arrived on a tourist visa, thus saving me a lot of money? Any suggestions on which company to use to ship from the US?
Thanks

It won't be cheap in the Zona Franca or anywhere in Chile.

There is or was a Nikon distributor at the ZF in Iquique. May still be there. Company was "Villamar Ltda". It was at Modulo 5002.

Your reduced-tax-merchandise limit is the ZF is about US$1200 or so if I remember correctly.

Repeat: Their stuff isn't cheap (Nikon distributor in ZF). It's much more than you would pay from an online store in the US but of course that is not an option for you now.

No, you don't avoid taxes via sending to Lista de Correos. They aren't quite that stooopid here. What you were suggesting is called "tax evasion" here.

There is a mechanism for purchasing outside the ZF for those with tourist visas, and paying the IVA and the usual markups, and then getting (maybe) a return of the IVA when leaving the country with the product. Unfortunately I have never personally known anyone who was successful at that. In any event, the overall price even without the IVA is likely still going to be substantial. I think that practice involves the preparation of a document called a Factura Turista. In the Zona Franca near me, apparently nobody has ever heard of such a thing.

If you send a camera item from the US to Chile that is worth more than US$35 it will be (1) lost, or (2) valued according to what Aduanas thinks it is worth and they calculate about 25 percent to that for you to pay to get it out of customs jail. You could even have somebody buy it in the US, scratch it up a bit with 600 grit sandpaper, slather a bit of toothpaste on it, lose all the factory wrappings, mail it to you in Chile, and declare it to be "used" -- and then just maybe Aduanas would value it at a little less than a new-looking item. But thick though they may be, the folks at Chilean Aduanas are not Bolivians.

As far as means for sending stuff to Chile, there is much related discussion on this forum, including suggestions that DHL may be in league with the devil in this area. Personal experience is that UPS sucks with its service in both the US and its connections in Chile, and that the normal certified mail via Correos de Chile, while bad, may be the least bad of the bad. In Chile, remember that the accent on "customer service" is on the word "bad."

Welcome to Chile. Not the country to look for anything cheap or reliable.