UK abolishes <£15 VAT free imports. EU to follow.

[madires]

As long as it's less than EUR 150 the PCB manufacturer just needs to register with an EU tax office, bill VAT, do the simplified customs declaration and transfer the VAT to the EU tax office. Additional costs for you: VAT.

[madires]

Why couldn't the payment processor (paypal, or a credit card company) handle the VAT ?

Either the seller or the importer has to pay VAT. These are the rules.

[magic]

Everything working as planned. Throwing a wrench into the system so that foreign sellers are forced to collect VAT, as the government cannot afford collecting it themselves.

[Microdoser]

Hold the phone - it's just one of the companies you may wish to deal with, but JLCPCBs site (my main concern, tbh) now has the following:

United Kingdom                           0~135GBP (VAT collected by JLCPCB)
                                                      >135GBP (VAT collected by local custom)

From https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/89-customs-duties-and-taxes

Seems to imply they will be handling it. Might email their support folks again and see if I can get hold of someone who knows what's up.

Previously, orders under £15 were not flagged or held by Royal Mail but orders over this were held ransom until the ransom money was paid, and a handling fee. Made an order last night to be imported into the UK. Selected royal mail delivery to test as time is not an issue.

Order total £40.69
Shipping £7.72
Total £48.40

No mention of VAT on the invoice. As you say, they say in their FAQ that they collect that.

I will see what happens when delivery is attempted.

If I can get boards under a total cost of £135 delivered with no extra costs then I know which delivery method I will now default to. This could be a better situation price-wise than before.

If royal mail tries to claim double VAT, I will point them to the FAQ on the webpage of JLCPCB and say that the VAT has already been taken and that any irregularities should be addressed directly with the seller.

Worth a try.

[station240]

It's still a mess as far as I can see, Online Marketplaces are required to collect VAT, yet there has not been enough time/information for everyone to do so.

Some who have tried to register, have been told they don't need to, or hit a dead end in the website where is doesn't allow the registration to be completed.

Tindie still haven't managed to sort it out.
https://discuss.tindie.com/t/so-do-we-stop-selling-to-the-uk-now/173679

Feel free to give your politicans hell for this, they deserve it.
Removing the <£15 VAT free imports, at the same time as all the Brexit related issues with customs, ports and shipping was a really dumb move.

[Microdoser]

It's still a mess as far as I can see, Online Marketplaces are required to collect VAT, yet there has not been enough time/information for everyone to do so.

Some who have tried to register, have been told they don't need to, or hit a dead end in the website where is doesn't allow the registration to be completed.

Tindie still haven't managed to sort it out.
https://discuss.tindie.com/t/so-do-we-stop-selling-to-the-uk-now/173679

Feel free to give your politicians hell for this, they deserve it.
Removing the <£15 VAT free imports, at the same time as all the Brexit related issues with customs, ports and shipping was a really dumb move.

Indeed, but you have to admit, the current set of Tories are very consistent in that regard. You know that whatever they do will be immensely stupid, and also give a fair chunk of money to their chums.

[themadhippy]

Feel free to give your politicans hell for this, they deserve it

not much point as we all know the reply will be along the lines of " waffle, brexit, bluster, jonney foreigner,dodgy  statistics, covid ,more waffle ,records show how good we are, incomprehensibly mumbling, its labours fault"

[alpher]

https://youtu.be/ar_7Z-MzPv8

[Red Squirrel]

On similar subject I hate that they make sales tax so complicated and require sellers to handle taxes for every jurisdiction. They should treat an online store the same as a physical store, you should only need to collect tax for your own jurisdiction.  When someone shops online it should be equivalent to if they came to your physical store.   In the states there are 10's of thousands of different tax jurisdictions for example, I don't even know how sellers are expected to handle all that.  The amount of legwork is just insane. How is it even normally done? 

[tycz]

Just in case anybody is interested: I've sent four packages from Australia to the UK this year so far. Two with a value of less than £15, the other two were somewhere between £15 and £135. They have all been delivered now and none of the recipients were charged any taxes/fees by the courier company (they were sent DDU).

[tszaboo]

On similar subject I hate that they make sales tax so complicated and require sellers to handle taxes for every jurisdiction. They should treat an online store the same as a physical store, you should only need to collect tax for your own jurisdiction.  When someone shops online it should be equivalent to if they came to your physical store.   In the states there are 10's of thousands of different tax jurisdictions for example, I don't even know how sellers are expected to handle all that.  The amount of legwork is just insane. How is it even normally done?

But they are.
If you buy something abroad (say, a laptop in the USA), and you try it bring it into the EU (in your cabin sized baggage), you shall declare it on the border, and pay VAT and import duty on it. You may also reclaim the sales TAX in the USA, if you can find a seller, who even would understand what a foreign customer is (or a debit card).
This isn't different.

[magic]

Maximizing tax revenue and competing with other jurisdictions is mutually exclusive, I'm afraid
But hey, look at all the free stuff you get from the government

[Zucca]

[Ian.M]

The UK Royal Mail has historically charged a £8 handling fee when collecting VAT and other customs fees on behalf of HMRC.   Of course a lot slid through that should have been charged for, because of false value and 'gift' declarations by suppliers, which is one of the factors that led to the loss of the <£15 VAT free import exemption. 

I can only suggest that suppliers should consider charging a reasonable handling fee, hopefully a small fraction of £8 for the costs incurred in collecting te VAT on behalf of HMRC.   I bet that suppliers will need to hedge against unfavorable exchange rate movements as I strongly suspect HMRC wont settle for less than the VAT in GBP at moment of purchase even if the supplier's native currency has dropped against GBP by the quarterly settlement date, but will quite happily accept any overpayment.

To fix it so the *CUSTOMER* pays the VAT on small imports without a disproportionate handling charge is difficult!  Theoretically there could be a government website that let you enter your delivery address and either prepay VAT or enter your (authenticated) VAT number, and generate a one-time valid QR code that you could send to your supplier.  On receipt of a parcel with a VAT QR code, customs would scan it, enter the declared value, and either a sticker with 'VAT PAID' or 'Recipient VAT REGISTERED' and the delivery address (so if the supplier attempts to scam HMRC by using a different possibly VAT registered customer's QR code, it doesn't reach the intended recipient), or a sticker with 'VAT of £nn.nn to be collected on delivery, would be  printed, which would leave you at the tender mercies of Royal Mail or the courier company's VAT collection fees.  However that would require a government competent in commissioning large IT systems on time and within budget, which most governments are bad at, and the British government is historically absolutely incapable of, + considerable initial investment which the current government is absolutely unlikely to do given their anti-China stance.   

[Fraser]

Story from the BBC today......

Brexit: 'I was asked to pay an extra £82 for my £200 coat' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55734277

[tszaboo]

Story from the BBC today......

Brexit: 'I was asked to pay an extra £82 for my £200 coat' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55734277

"I didn't even know when the parcels would be coming - so I sent both back without paying the extra fees and won't be ordering anything from Europe again any time soon," Ellie says.

That's a mayor win for the UK's well know coat business.

[olkipukki]

Brexit: 'I was asked to pay an extra £82 for my £200 coat' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55734277

...and probably end up paying VAT twice, very unlikely EU seller has adjusted their system to exclude a local VAT for UK (non-EU) buyers

[Microdoser]

I feel we shall see more and more of this as the true effects become clearer regarding the position UK consumers now find themselves in.

We have just cut ourselves out of one of the largest free markets in the world.

Now all that trade will not be free.

[bodger]

Story from the BBC today......

Brexit: 'I was asked to pay an extra £82 for my £200 coat' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55734277

Can someone explain how they came up with a figure of £82? For a £200 coat afaik it should be 20% VAT + 2% duties + £8 handling fee so that would be ~£52.

[SilverSolder]

Story from the BBC today......

Brexit: 'I was asked to pay an extra £82 for my £200 coat' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55734277

But Maude, 87, of Clovelly, North Devon, knew exactly what she was voting for!

[Monkeh]

Can someone explain how they came up with a figure of £82? For a £200 coat afaik it should be 20% VAT + 2% duties + £8 handling fee so that would be ~£52.

UPS charge £15, VAT will be on the item, shipping, and duty.

So assuming the actual price of the item is £200, and the duty is 2% (I'll take your word on that), and shipping was, say, £18, that gets you to £281.40.

[bodger]

UPS charge £15, VAT will be on the item, shipping, and duty.

So assuming the actual price of the item is £200, and the duty is 2% (I'll take your word on that), and shipping was, say, £18, that gets you to £281.40.

I didn't realise the limit for the processing fee was as high as that (£15). The 2% duty figure was just what I could roughly remember the last time I read up on it - the correct figure is 2.5%. But the total makes more sense when factoring in delivery charges, most things I've purchased have been below the £135 value so did not incur a VAT charge on delivery.

Hopefully, the one good thing that comes out of this is I no longer have to worry about incurring a customs charge when buying PCBs between £15-£135, which was a real pain in the butt the last time DHL made the delivery.

[Ian.M]

UPS charge £15, VAT will be on the item, shipping, and duty.

Which is proof that HMRC and the politicians that set VAT rates are no better than a bunch of thieves as a significant proportion of the shipping cost will have been incurred for services provided outside the UK yet there is no reduced VAT rate on incoming international shipping.

[IanB]

In the states there are 10's of thousands of different tax jurisdictions for example, I don't even know how sellers are expected to handle all that.  The amount of legwork is just insane. How is it even normally done?

I assume they must have a massive tax database. For instance, when buying from Amazon recently, the amount of tax to be charged changed when I updated the delivery address to the next city over. It wasn't random either, I could watch the tax amount change when I switched back and forth between address A and address B in adjacent zip codes.

I agree it's insane. Is Amazon really putting all the collected sales tax into the right buckets and then forwarding the revenues to thousands of individual cities, counties and states across the USA?

[IanB]

What, for example, do I do if I want to buy something from Welectron? Pay them their 19% VAT, somehow claim it back, pay another 20% VAT and a processing fee when it arrives here? Yeah, that sounds stupid - hence why I can no longer do small business with them. Them and thousands of other businesses we're now either locked out of or being penalised for using.

Shouldn't the free trade agreement mean you pay VAT in Germany and then the goods are shipped tax paid to the UK? As I understand it there should just be a customs declaration to be completed by the seller.