Well, my humble advice is that when it comes to furniture or heavy stuff like that, it's always better to get them from where you're planning to live, specially when it's a long distance between the place where you're shipping stuff from and the place where you're shipping them in.
As for the customs' thing, everyone in here knows that everything here moves by money when it comes to customs or any other agency that follows the government in here (paper work for ANYTHING and EVERYTHING!!!! and it's always a hassle, trust me!!!!), it's like the old fashioned coin public phones, you ALWAYS have to pay something, you either have to pay the custom's fees which usually are HIGHER than anyone would expect -and for no reason that makes sense- or you'll have to pay almost the same amount of money but with less hassle and less drives to the custom's place , but in this case, you'll be paying that money as a bribe! and ya, it's much easier than going official, but be careful who you're gonna bribe if you decided to do that.
So my advice? buy anything you think you need to ship from here, you can find all the stuff you need in here, with reasonable prices, and my advice? don't try to be cheap, you'll find many sellers and many brands in here, so just don't go for the cheaper one, cause it means it's less in quality and will be broken sooner than you think, another reason to buy things from here? the products with warranty?? you won't need to ship the things back to be fixed if they needed to!
Hope I could help, have a nice staying in here, if you can anyway.
Good luck!
