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Shipping from Germany

Update:
I used My Germany to get some parts - mods from Pinball Universe (PU Parts)

Good option for those who want stuff from PU who won’t ship direct to UK.
PU shipped to My Germany address for 7 Euro then My Germany charged me 16 Euro to me.
Didn’t have to pay duty etc… but I guess that can be hit or miss.
 
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Update:
I used My Germany to get some parts - mods from Pinball Universe (PU Parts)

Good option for those who want stuff from PU who won’t ship direct to UK.
PU shipped to My Germany address for 7 Euro then My Germany charged me 16 Euro to me.
Didn’t have to pay duty etc… but I guess that can be hit or miss.
There is no duty on pinball machines or parts from the EU to UK, those categories are zero % rated for import duty.
 
There is no duty on pinball machines or parts from the EU to UK, those categories are zero % rated for import duty.
Good to know.
You had an option to pay a bit extra for DHL to deliver to door or cheaper option which I took to use local agents. So it was DHL then Parcelforce. TBH I was expecting a 12 quid handling fee or some other charge…
 
Good to know.
You had an option to pay a bit extra for DHL to deliver to door or cheaper option which I took to use local agents. So it was DHL then Parcelforce. TBH I was expecting a 12 quid handling fee or some other charge…
Yeah, I'd have perhaps expected a small fee for them to administer the payment of UK VAT on your behalf, which is payable at the border for all imports from the EU. If you didn't pay the UK VAT for any reason, then probably best not to go into that at all in a public forum :)
 
If the items were less than £125 then the VAT is supposed to get collected/paid at the point of sale.

Not sure how this service would work in these terms but I think you would possibly end up paying VAT twice (German VAT as delivered by company to a german address and then MyGermany paying the UK VAT as part of their charges) or UK VAT is getting overlooked due to the low value and the delivery companies expecting that it has already been taken care off.
 
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If the items were less than £125 then the VAT is supposed to get collected/paid at the point of sale.

Not sure how this service would work in these terms but I think you would possibly end up paying VAT twice (German VAT as delivered by company to a german address and then MyGermany paying the UK VAT as part of their charges) or UK VAT is getting overlooked due to the low value and the delivery companies expecting that it has already been taken care off.
That's a good point. I wonder if this actually happens for any company other than the big ones - Amazon, ebay, etc. I can't imagine that smaller online sellers a) know about this UK legislation, b) would have any intention of going through the process of collecting taxes, filling out a UK tax return, sending received VAT to the UK, and dealing with whatever complexity this causes in their own local tax returns. I can imagine them either a) collecting the UK VAT and pocketing it instead, or b) not bothering with UK tax laws which presumably have no legal grounding in their countries anyway and, if they did, it'd be near impossible for HMRC to actually enforce.

I just looked and the legislation does appear to suggest that it applies to all online sellers, which seems totally unrealistic imo o_O
 
i’ve had it both ways. been charged vat twice and other times no vat charged by seller or on import to uk
 
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The big market places like ebay amazon and aliexpress appear to do all the vat collection on their sellers behalf, and your correct regarding the legislation anyone selling to someone in the UK is required to register with hmrc and collect vat to pay them, its why a lot of smaller sellers in the US stopped selling to UK customers as they didn't want the expense.

EU countries now are the same or will be shortly as that's where the rules originally came from, the UK just started doing it earlier.
 
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The big market places like ebay amazon and aliexpress appear to do all the vat collection on their sellers behalf, and your correct regarding the legislation anyone selling to someone in the UK is required to register with hmrc and collect vat to pay them, its why a lot of smaller sellers in the US stopped selling to UK customers as they didn't want the expense.

EU countries now are the same or will be shortly as that's where the rules originally came from, the UK just started doing it earlier.

i’ve had it both ways. been charged vat twice and other times no vat charged by seller or on import to uk

Good info. I've updated my previous post about import VAT to reflect this and Alan's experience of the reality. Hopefully that'll be useful if anyone queries this type of scenario in the future.
 
Annoyingly they've also used it as on opportunity to remove the lower limit which used to be around the £16/£18 mark before charging import charges and now charge on everything, my guess was it would have used to be too much physical work to collect small amounts it wasnt worth border force doing it but now theyve offloaded all that work on the sellers its worth it to them to collect it.
 
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