And obviously, if you order in smaller amounts (20 or 30 quid's worth at a time), you are in very little danger of getting hit with the duties.
That used to be the case, but since they changed the way they do things a couple of years ago, this has not been my experience. I was stung on several smallish orders (in the £20-£30 range), to a degree that it just made ordering miniatures from outside the EU unviable and so I stopped doing it altogether.
But what I don't understand is that I buy things from Amazon US, and Amazon marketplace sellers in the US all the time, and never get hit with these transactions. What secret do they have for avoiding it that figure manufacturers don't have?