PSA for those in the EU: CDJAPAN/NEOWING starts collecting VAT at checkout!

[ilef]

Italy sure is wonderful for certain things, eh?

Back when I made my first "VAT paid in advance" order on CDJapan (a 4 CDs album), I paid:

1407 yen [around €9,44] - VAT
300 yen [€2,01] - Service fee
1200 yen [€8,05] - Standard fee

But back to that case, as we'd say in Italy: "Ci mangiano sopra", it sucks to live in Italy for certain stuff. Yeah, all in all, I consider what CDJapan has started doing with VAT a true blessing, I no longer risk getting screwed over by whatever price those criminals make.

[LuxKiller65]

It sure is a blessing to avoid customs thievery like these admin fees (which have been most certainly increased due to this eTax thing), but it was still better back in the days, when your packages had a good chance of not getting taxed at all, especially smaller packages with a bunch of CDs or games.

So what they're doing is that they really push customers to declare their incoming packages and pay VAT at checkout, in order to avoid any charges and delays at receipt. In the end they will collect a lot more VAT than before, which was the initial goal.

Win-win for them, lose-lose for you.

Not taking into account the fact that I doubt eBay will give all the VAT money collected to whoever is supposed to receive it (a EU organisation? or a different organisation for each country?).

[ilef]

Yeah, you're right, but at this point we've been forced to take the lesser of two evils.

[sechsterangriff]

Originally Posted by LuxKiller65

It sure is a blessing to avoid customs thievery like these admin fees (which have been most certainly increased due to this eTax thing), but it was still better back in the days, when your packages had a good chance of not getting taxed at all, especially smaller packages with a bunch of CDs or games.

So what they're doing is that they really push customers to declare their incoming packages and pay VAT at checkout, in order to avoid any charges and delays at receipt. In the end they will collect a lot more VAT than before, which was the initial goal.

Win-win for them, lose-lose for you.

Not taking into account the fact that I doubt eBay will give all the VAT money collected to whoever is supposed to receive it (a EU organisation? or a different organisation for each country?).

The admin fees are up to the local carrier and whether they got more expensive or cheaper with IOSS has a lot to do with how the market operates in each member-state. In Portugal it definitely got cheaper across the board, especially with the large private carriers such as DHL or Fedex which previously would charge you an arm and leg with the sky being the limit to handle the customs process in your behalf. The fee of the national postal carrier is now essentially half of what it used to be. Sure, previously you could get lucky and have your parcel skip customs entirely. But the opposite could also happen and I would be fu**ed with fees or/and with the parcel stuck in customs.

Regarding ebay, it uses IOSS so it implies that VAT is being paid to a member-state, usually the one where the parcel first enters the EU.