office of the head of customs for a couple of hours (after waiting in the car for a couple of hours). Me and like 15 other Dominicans, literally sitting in her office on chairs around her desk. After waiting for some time she literally went around the room and asked each person what it was they were receiving, why they were receiving it, was it for resale (mine was replacing a laptop that had died), etc. Everyone sat and listened to everyone else give their answers. It was weird.
After hearing the story of each person she would sort of pick a peso amount, seemingly out of the air, as the fee they would have to pay to get their item out of customs. Everyone had to pay something.
She got to me and I explained the situation that my company was sending a new laptop. I had actually been driven over by a guy from the company I was working at who had an uncle who worked pretty high up in the government, just in case he needed to make some calls. In the end, the woman charged me the equivalent of like a dollar...she was giving me flirty eyes through most of the time we were there. I guess being a not-fully-ugly Gringo has its advantages sometimes.
This is my long way of saying that, in one my one very related experience (and through a lot of sort of related experiences) 1) be patient, 2) tell them to look good, 3) use a big-name shipper to alleviate as many worries as possible 4) tell them to be prepared to pay some bribe money to someone because that country (like many Latin American countries) has all sort of little corruption as a standard way of doing business.