European Shipping & VAT Changes
Posted by Tamsyn Martin on
From July 1st VAT rules are changing and when you purchase from the UK you will now have to pay VAT on purchases of goods with a value below 22 EUR, not just above, which is what the rule was previously.
You may have seen that many small UK businesses are now (either temporarily or permanently) stopping selling to the EU at the moment and that is because, although I have simplified it above, this change is very confusing and complicated.
From my understanding however, the main issue is that to continue selling to countries within the EU, us UK based small businesses/independent designers etc need to either appoint an EU-established intermediary to fulfil our VAT obligations under IOSS (Import One-Stop Shop - a new system that allows businesses selling goods to buyers in the EU to collect, declare and pay VAT to the tax authorities, instead of the customer paying the VAT when the goods are imported into the EU) or we can continue "as normal" with our customers paying the VAT when their packages arrive in the destination country as before, just now with a lower threshold (this situation applies to those of us who sell on our own platforms, if you sell through a marketplace such as Etsy or Amazon, they have their own IOSS registration & they collect the VAT for you).
We are choosing to continue "as normal" here on the website, though we understand that charging VAT at checkout would be convenient and would show you all applicable charges upfront, this is currently not viable for our teeny business as there would be extra costs that we would need to incur to set up and continue the IOSS registration and the VAT collection.
To clarify, this means that if you are purchasing directly from us here on www.VelvetVolcano.co.uk / www.VelvetVolcano.com from within an EU member country, that you will need to pay VAT and service charges upon import into your country (there would be VAT and service charges in both of the scenarios that I outlined and unfortunately the change in the threshold for VAT collection is completely out of our control). We advise looking into the VAT charges for your specific country before purchasing so you are aware of the charges that will incur upon import.
We will, however be re-opening our Etsy store, so if you would like to pay for these VAT charges upfront, that may be a better option for you.
We hope you understand and still continue to purchase from us as we really and truly value your support!