ebay VAT Double Charges? – July 1st 2021

The new ebay VAT system seems to be working.

If you read the previous post on ebay VAT here, we had doubts about what would happen on July 1st with regards to ordering parts from the UK & outside of Europe for delivery inside the EU.

  • Would we get charged customs fees when the parts arrived in Greece?
  • Would we get charged VAT twice?

In our experience

In our experience so far the process seems to be the same, if not better than before.

ie depending on the delivery country you select in ebay, the VAT will now change according to your country. In the case of Greece the VAT changes to 24%

With regards to customs duties, in our experience, products have not been stopped at customs, the process is the same as it was before, perhaps it is even faster now because Greek customs do not need to check the product to see if they need to charge VAT. VAT has been paid when you ordered the product.

In short

The downsides of the new system is that we now pay VAT on every single purchase. For products under 20-30 Euro, it means the price have increased by 24%.

The upsides is that for products up to 150 Euro we no longer have to pay the customs charges with post office, which was around 17-22 Euro before.

And because the products are not being held in customs in Greece, the delivery time for products is around 2 weeks quicker.

So for expensive products the new system is arguably better than it was before, it is faster and cheaper.

For cheap products the delivery times are still faster but we are paying 24% more. But given the products are so cheap to start with ie less than 20-30 euro, the increase is not too bad.

DISCLAIMER: These have been our experiences with the new ebay VAT system, your experiences may be different.

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