In general, the new regulations for trade between the EU and the UK are as follows:
As a private customer, tax will be charged on parcels (not necessarily total order values) under 135 GBP. Shipments over 135 GBP (excluding VAT and shipping) will be processed without tax.
As a business customer with a valid VAT number, you will not be charged taxes regardless of the shipment value.
Unfortunately, the new rules presented us with some hurdles that we are still working to overcome within our ordering system though we do have the following working solutions in effect:
Business Customers
As the VAT check of the European Union does not work anymore, VAT numbers must now be checked manually for every order.
When you order with us for the first time after the Brexit rules go into effect, regardless whether you are an existing customer or not, you will be charged VAT on your order in our Webshop. Your order will then be checked by our customer service team. They will perform a VAT check and if your VAT number is valid AND all your company data matches, your customer account will be changed to an account without VAT. You will, of course, be refunded the VAT already paid. The final invoice will reflect the prices without VAT.
All subsequent orders will then be without VAT because your account will be set correctly. We will still perform VAT checks on all orders and should the status of your VAT number change we will get in touch with you to clear up what happened and adjust the account to match the new circumstances.
Private Customers
As mentioned above the 135 GBP threshold is per shipment and not per order. Unfortunately, our existing order processing system makes the decision on which goods go into which package when the invoice has been created. This means that when you place the order online in our shop and go to the checkout we, in fact, do not know yet in how many packages your order will be split and what value these packages will have. For example, if you order multiple items totaling 1000 GBP (clearly over the 135 GBP threshold) but then due to volume, weight, availability or simply location within our warehouse the order is split into five different packages and one or more of these packages could then be under 135 GBP. The only solution we were able to implement for now was that VAT is always added for private customers at the time of purchase. Once the delivery notes have been created and the goods have been packaged will we then refund any VAT paid on shipments over 135 GBP.
Please note that as a byproduct of this method we also charge VAT if you order a single item over 135 GBP. We understand that, in this case, it is not possible that the order gets split so no tax should be charged but we were not able to automatically sort this in our shop.
We are working on finding better solutions for the UK and hope that over the next couple of months we will be able to offer an improved service for our UK customers.
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland maintains alignment with the EU VAT rules for goods. Unfortunately, since all of our processes are based on the country code we are not able to differentiate Northern Ireland from the UK. Because of this, we had to make the decision to suspend shipping to Northern Ireland. We were not able to implement this in our webshop as we can, again, only block a country but not a region. So it is possible to place an order but the order will then be cancelled in our backend. Any payment already made will, of course, be refunded.
Again, we admit that this is not an elegant solution but are working to implement a better process over the next couple of months.
Import taxes and duties
For orders under 135 GBP we have to collect the sales tax - for orders over we do not collect the sales tax but you likely pay import tax when the goods arrive in the UK. Also please check on the latest information on import duties! What amount you pay when importing the goods into the UK is not up to us and we have no information on it!