The whole situation is a complete and utter clusterfuck
Here is what a guy in the UK was sent by UPS for an order he made from Germany
BTW, his order was sent in 3 packages
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To be clear, this isn’t affecting the sender, right? Only the recipient?
This import VAT change, in purpose, is meant to take the responsibility and action off of the UK customs and put it on the shoulders of senders (for the orders valued below 135£ and sent to individuals).
In a sense it’s only meant affect senders of items into UK, that they have to do the custom’s work for them. The recipient, if the change and new procedure is followed, doesn’t have to do anything any more. No customs payments or anything, they would just receive their package/items, as the package/items would have already been VAT charged at the time of purchase.
There are 195 countries in the world.
Now imagine world trade if every single one of them required a business to register with them if they wanted to sell goods there.
It really blows my mind what they were thinking
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Import fees are only for goods that are not made or processed in the UK. It’s mainly clothing and other goods that are only passed through the UK, but have their origine in a third country.
VAT is mostly a zero sum game. Instead paying UK VAT you pay the local VAT. A German customer now pays 19% German VAT instead of 20% UK VAT.
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One simple email: private, home use, hobby equipment, skateboard spare parts. Skateboard wheels, trucks, deck…
This was not about skateboard parts Frank.
In my experience, shipments from countries outside the EU will get taxed no matter what.
Customs employees have discovered search engines so declaring a lower value does not help so much.
I have payed customs for items declared as gift.
Furthermore courier companies make a lot of money from brokerage and storage fees.
I am sorry to say that until now the majority of the items I bought online were from the UK (not just esk8 related) but with the current situation I have turned to other solutions.
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Thats because it is
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Wait your just not noticing it sucks? this was obvious 4 years ago 
(forgetting media bogus) this was the plan all along.
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Little update from my side, one of the parcels I sent to the UK finally reached the customer after about 3 weeks, for that one I haven’t gotten any problems with customs or VAT yet. Seems the customs are not looking too closely at the new regulations for now. Another parcel is still on its way so lets see how that one goes.
Anyhow I stopped shipping to the UK untill more is known, yesterday the local news also mentioned the shipping and VAT troubles with the UK for businesses.
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Does anybody know if the 135 GBP limit applies to goods alone or to goods + shipping? If I sell a 100 GBP DAVEGA with 40 GBP UPS shipping would it be OK not to charge the VAT?
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If I’m not in the United Kingdom, what would the consequences be for just following my own laws — and to fuck with whatever the UK laws might be — ?
Serious question
You have the right to stop shipping to UK if it’s not worth the trouble.
That’s what I would do if I would have a small business.
If that new UK system will show up as success, other countries will go that way too.
Just imagine you need a tax payer number for each country you want to ship to, check the sales every 3 months and make your tax payment. That’s a huge overhead on additional work.
I‘m feeling bad for people in UK, but I hope as many vendors as possible stop selling to UK, just to make a statement and hopefully the UK government will cancel that new regulations in future.
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Good point, Andy. I fully agree.
My new e-shop actually does not allow orders from the UK. However, I just got an email from a guy in the UK who would like to purchase from me so I’m looking for some options for making it happen without me having to get a VAT registration in the UK.
I like what Metr guys have done:
This is very sensible. I may go with the same approach in the short run.
I’m just not sure how the shipping cost fits into the puzzle. The customs office in the Czech Rep would charge you the customs + VAT based on the value of both goods and shipping, which makes me think that the UK 135 GBP limit is for goods + shipping rather than goods alone. My Google-fu hasn’t been strong enough to confirm this though.
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What exactly that means? Are you suggesting you would just ship to the UK without collecting the VAT? I’m afraid the customs would return the package back to you in that case.
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I would suggest using a 3PL service, or fulfilling UK orders through a vendor ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) who can provide support too so you don’t have to mess around if the customer has to send stuff out and into the UK aftersale
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It’s goods plus shipping when I order in Ali express. I assume they are following the law.
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This just shows how intelligent our Mps are they expect Chinese sellers to actually pay the uk the correct amount tax?
They will probably pay a fraction of what they are sopposed to. Meaning more profit for them and costing us all more to shop
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Thanks Justin. Exactly what I was looking for. 
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