Hello everyone,
when shipping from amazon.de to switzerland they will make you pay in advance 20€ for import taxes and then give the remaining back if they pay less than 20€.
Has anyone ever used this sistem? I'd like to know your impression.
My order is 20€, so this is actually doubling the price. I might not be willing to pay 40€ for this, but I've heard that if your order is just 20€ you're likely not to incur in taxes. Can you confirm or give me any experience on this?

Thank you in advance.

I have been ordering from Amazon.de for years now and have never had to pay import duties in advance. Only rarely have I ever had to pay duty at all even upon delivery. If your order is only €20 there should be no import duty at all so you shouldn't have to pay anything in advance. If I want to order a large amount of things I tend to break it down into smaller orders (under €40) to avoid the import duties. And since shipping is free there is no additional cost. Have you actually processed your order up until the final confirmation to see if you are charged the import fee? Are you buying from Amazon or the Marketplace? That might be the difference.

Ahhh... that explains why I got a 17 euro refund from amazon.de. I was scratching my head about it, but thought fine if they want to refund me money let them.

I didn't pay much attention to the additional costs when I was ordering (it was all in foreign and I don't like using google translate when personal details are on the page).

My original order was > 300 euros though and it took me longer than a month to get the refund.

Maybe you should do what I do and order from Amazon UK which wouldn't be "in foreign" and, in all the years I've been ordering from them, I've never had to pay any additional charges, just the price of the books and the postage.
Most of the books I buy now are for my Kindle, but I still buy quite a few scientific and reference books in paper form.