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It is nice to hear the perspective from the EU side, thanks for persevering! I am still really keen to shop from the EU, some thing used to be cheaper as frankenbike said, but also you get different brands / better stock levels, especially for skis but also other climbing/outdoor brands and presumably most things too. What's your shop?
I know what you mean about the lack of guidance, I was really surprised there was not at least a single page cheat sheet to help us through it. Most of the news stories about it seemed contradictory and not helpful. Which is what set me off trying to get my head around it, and there's still more to learn (I updated my post above with your point about surcharge vs VAT). It must be worse from your side with even more hoops to jump through. Presumably HRMC are inundated and have a backlog to clear - not helped by January being tax return season?
sifriday-
I am still really keen to shop from the EU, some thing used to be cheaper as frankenbike said, but also you get different brands / better stock levels, especially for skis but also other climbing/outdoor brands and presumably most things too.
Same here, end of a new bike build, I had to shop for a seatpost last week (in the end I got one from eB**) and I can see the limited stocks and brand availability being an issue in the UK. Stocks might be Brexit related, but the variety of brands doesn't match what you can get from the EU.
disq
So, we have registered at HMRC to get a UK VAT number so we can charge VAT and send it to the UK. We applied as soon as the "sort of deal" was done and the rules were clarified and about 3 weeks ago received an email saying that it'd take 30 days. We got another recently which said it may take longer. They've also said we should definitely NOT charge VAT but should charge 20% "surcharge" which we can then give to HMRC later and change every single bloody invoice we've issued to a UK customer (we've left it as VAT, bollocks to that).
The guidance is a bit sketchy but HMRC are screwing it up at the moment for people trying to sell from the EU into the UK. It shouldn't take much validation to register to send money to HMRC (all the databases are out there) but for some reason their validation is backlogged.