Six refusals, and only two of them are ours.
A list of things this site will decline to sell you as a present, with whose rule each one is. Four are somebody else’s law, one is a licensing condition, and one is simply a decision we made and can defend.
The six.
Ordered by how often somebody argues with us about them, which is roughly the reverse of how reasonable the argument is.
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Alcohol across any border
Excise duty is charged where alcohol is consumed. Sending a case abroad to a private address means either paying duty in the destination country or breaking its law, and several countries prohibit it arriving by post at all.
Hawkstone reaches ten European countries through distributors, which is the proper route. The stockist finder is where that lives.
Whose rule: excise duty and destination law. Not ours.
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Meat, dairy and cheese into the EU
Personal consignments of meat and dairy from Great Britain into the European Union have been prohibited since 2021. Not restricted — prohibited, and seized.
That is the cheese truckle, the ham and the sausages, and there is no declaration that fixes it.
Whose rule: EU biosecurity. Not ours.
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Fresh produce, seeds and plants almost anywhere
Australia and New Zealand in particular, and most of the world in general. A swede in an envelope is a soil-borne pathogen risk arriving at an airport, and it will be destroyed.
This is the origin of the line about not being able to post a swede to Sydney, which somebody genuinely attempted.
Whose rule: destination biosecurity, and they are right.
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Anything alcoholic to a workplace postroom
Because the licensing condition is that the person receiving it is age-checked at the door, and a postroom clerk signing for forty cases is not that.
On a corporate order the fix is home addresses, which is also better for the recipient and worse for the person compiling the list.
Whose rule: licensing, applied by us.
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Anything at all to somebody who has not consented to being contacted
A gift generates emails. Where you supply somebody else’s email address, we contact them once about the gift and never again unless they ask.
What we will not do is add them to anything, because a present is not consent and treating it as one is how a gifting feature turns into a list-building exercise.
Whose rule: ours, and PECR agrees.
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A gift card as a staff trivial benefit, without saying so
We will sell you one. We will also tell you, on the page, that it is a cash voucher and therefore taxable, which a great many corporate gifting sites do not.
It is the only refusal on this list that is really a warning rather than a refusal, and it is here because it costs somebody money every December.
Whose rule: HMRC. We are just saying it out loud.
What to do instead.
| Instead of | Do this |
|---|---|
| Sending beer abroad | Find a stockist in their country, or send a gift card to somebody in the UK |
| Sending cheese to Berlin | A dry hamper, or a gift card, or nothing at all |
| Posting produce to Sydney | A patch, which produces nothing that has to travel until it does not |
| A case to a postroom | Home addresses, with a dry option in the same file |
| A gift card to staff | A £50 box, which is a trivial benefit and is not taxable |
| Adding somebody to a list | Ask them |
Six refusals, and who made each one.
Four are somebody else’s law
Excise duty, EU biosecurity, and two national import regimes.
One is a licensing condition
Nobody can be age-checked at a postroom, so nothing alcoholic goes to one.
One is a warning rather than a refusal
We will sell you a staff gift card. We will also tell you it is taxable.
All six are refused at the basket
With the reason named, so nobody is annoyed at the wrong organisation.
Why we would rather refuse than take the money.
A parcel seized at a border is destroyed. Nobody refunds it — not the courier, not the destination authority, and not, in most retailers’ terms, the seller.
Which means the commercially attractive version of this is to take the order, print the declaration, and let the customer discover the problem at the far end. It happens constantly and it is a defensible reading of most terms and conditions.
It is also a way of selling somebody a thing that will not arrive. So the order is refused at the basket with a reason attached, and the reason names whose rule it is, so that nobody wastes twenty minutes being annoyed at the wrong organisation.
The refusals, questioned.
No. The risk is not really yours — it is a border authority’s time and a destroyed parcel, and a waiver does not change either.
That is between you and the border. We will tell you what the rules are and we are not going to pretend they are different.
Regularly, in both directions. This page is reviewed twice a year and dated, and where we are not certain it says so.
The postroom rule, by a distance, because it is the only one that is ours and therefore the only one anybody thinks is negotiable.
The cross-border page, in full.
Three categories, five rules, and the one thing that always works.
Get told before everyone else
One email a fortnight about what is actually happening in the fields, the brewery and the pub — including the bits that went wrong.
