Popcorn Dave said:
Import duty really has nothing to do with the vendor you purchase from; rather it's all about the tax practices in the country in which you live. You were billed for duty by your government, not by the supplier (sometimes the collection of said duty is offloaded to the shipping carrier, which will then generally tack on its own "brokerage" fees in addition to whatever duty was assigned by your government). Since import duties vary by country and commodity, it is near-impossible for a vendor to make any kind of out front statement as to how much you will have to pay to receive your order (although approximately 20%-30% seems to be most common in The UK, EU, Scandinavia and South America*), at least when any kind of volume sales are involved - it literally can take hours to research all of the particulars (tariff codes, etc) pertaining to a given shipment to a given country, and this is just not a viable practice for most vendors to undertake. The onus is on the consumer to know your local laws and to plan your purchases accordingly.
Many vendors do mark down the invoice shipped with an order to help out their customers, but it should be understood that this is something that they do at their own risk and as a favor to their customer. These vendors are at the mercy of their own local governments, and a marked down invoice can amount to charges of fraud and/or perjury if investigated. As such, vendors who mark down their invoices for international shipping are doing you a bigger favor than you might think, so it's good to be appreciative of this.
I only mention all of this because I do a large volume of international sales and shipping (in an entirely unrelated industry), and I tend to end up on the receiving end of similar complaints more frequently than I would like.
Cheers.
(*If you are a US based consumer, you are fortunate in that there is zero import or export duty on most consumer items - the government extracts your money in other ways)
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