I got very disapointed when I saw the exorbitant shipping cost for international customers (I live in Sweden), 100$ for 1-12 cards. Wow! Horrendous! And that's just the return shipping, I'm gonna have to pay the bandits at my local post office a ridiculous amount as well to ship my cards in the first place naturally (although nowhere near as bad as 100$). And then at the end of it I came to think of another thing: "Wait a minute..... what about those vultures at the customs office, It wouldn't surprise me if those highway brigands would try to take a cut from me as well on the return shipment?" So... I would like to ask, do they? Does anyone know? Any scandinavians that has used CGC? Is that what the "declared value" thing on each of your cards is all about? Because if they're gonna hold my cards hostage and not give them back before I give them ransom money, It would just be too much for me. It wouldn't make any real sense to get robbed for customs/import fees/tolls, etc for items (my cards) that were bought and sold within Sweden and are already in my possession. But then again, we don't live in a logical world do we.
Grading your cards is extremely expensive in the first place, and the international shipping cost CGC is asking for is outrageous, topping it off with possibly insane customs fees or whatever from your local den of thieves would completely break the backs of small-time collectors such as myself. So I really need to know what the deal is about this before I put in a submission. It just isn't worth to grade your cards if you're going to get robbed of 90% of the value of your cards from grading costs, shipping costs and possibly custom/import fees to top it off.
Related side question to this issue: is there any CGC authorized store here in Europe somewhere I can send my cards in for grading to? That would be ideal of course and solve most of my problems.