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I bought a new ebike battery from the amazon uk website, turns out the battery has been shipped from Germany so I've now been hit with a substantial VAT and customs duty cost that I have to pay before the courier will deliver the battery. Nothing was mentioned in the listing about this as I wouldn't have bought it otherwise. As far as I'm concerned I bought it essentially from the UK so shouldn't be hit with extra costs. Any advise welcomed.
You bought it from Germany from a selling platform for some reason since January 1st things now cost more from other countries.
watching with interest, bought something on uk site fulfilled by amazon turns out its coming via 'merica.
will be a bit pissed if I end up with import/vat charge
Can't you refuse the delivery and get refund?
Any advise welcomed
Don't buy from amazon
Just refuse delivery. It'll go back and you should get a refund.
It's a violation of Amazons terms for sellers to not ship inclusive of vat and duty on their home web site - .co.uk in UK .de in Germany etc - we have the problem going the other way. 1st stop is ask seller to refund duty, let them know the amount, if they refuse raise with Amazon directly. Refunding duty is a pain for sellers as it usually means a loss but so does a EU round trip of a refused parcel which can cost £30 or so.
Ah this Brexit thing was a good idea wasn’t it
I'm having a similar issue but going the other way, see I sell on Amazon but I've had to switch off sending anything out of the UK via Amazon, their rules are that the customer should not have any extra charges applied after the purchase, but now we are out of the EU we should send all our orders DDP (Delivered Duty Paid) but that is an expensive option and one not every postal service can do DDP.
Paying customs for orders outside of the UK should be now considered normal and expected, DDP will be nice but don't expect it, DHL charges the seller £16 for the effort and the seller would also as DDP suggests be paying the duty, something the buyer needs to so the purchase price would have had to have had all those charges built in.
I would double check to see you didn't pay vat when you placed the order, otherwise you are paying vat twice, once german vat at 19%, then UK vat at 20%, duty and a handling charge are now something you need to expect on orders outside of the UK.
watching with interest, bought something on uk site fulfilled by amazon turns out its coming via ‘merica.
will be a bit pissed if I end up with import/vat charge
You should be fine as its Fullfilled by Amazon FBA, so they are sending it and so according to their rules charges should have already been delt with.
Have you been invoiced for the VAT and duty by the courier or by Amazon. Care to share a link to the actual listing on Amazon?
I’ve ordered a few things from the US via Amazon’s global program thing.
They tax a small deposit for duty etc and sometimes it gets refunded. Absolutely no dramas.