Shipping to the EU

After Brexit, many people have had expensive surprises after buying from UK companies. We are often asked if there’s anything we can do to help our European customers avoid additional costs. The good news is that we’ve done a lot of this, and have experience in most of the systems we can use. Here’s a summary of how it works.

We’ve made it easy.

As a European customer, simply pay the amount you’re asked to pay at the checkout. We take care of the rest.

Your package should arrive quickly.

About 90% of our packages to the European Union arrive within 7 days of ordering , and usually after about 5 days. If there are complications (2023 brought industrial action, the usual Christmas panic, a couple of random Customs inspections, and a massive cyber-attack on the UK’s postal system), it may take a little longer. The current record is about 21 days, but delays that long are ‘less than 1%’ rare.

If you absolutely need your order within a week or two, contact us. We can send your package by UPS instead, which guarantees faster service but costs about £5 more.

How the Customs situation works from a tax perspective.

Supperware Ltd is based in the United Kingdom, which is outside the European Economic Area. All our goods are made here and dispatched from here and we don’t (yet) have a distributor. For most of our EU customers, we use an internationally-recognised system to pay appropriate taxes so it [usually] works just as easily as it did before Brexit.

Of course it’s a little more complex for us, and harder to describe. Our customers also get confused, which is why we explain it here.

If you live in the UK, we charge you £65 for the head tracker and add 20% VAT, which shows up on the invoice as a separate charge. So you pay £78 plus shipping.

If you are a non-business customer in the EU, we pay the appropriate tax in your country. A private EU-registered company called an IOSS (Import One-Stop Shop) administers this tax on Supperware’s behalf, and certifies to the authorities that it’s done so. Every month, we tell it exactly what we’ve sold into Europe, it invoices us (taxes plus fees), and ensures that the correct amounts are paid.

None of this shows up on the invoice, because we can’t call it VAT: it’s now just a fee that Supperware has to pay as part of its operations. So, if you’re a European customer, your invoice will show £78 per head tracker + shipping. You pay the same as a UK customer. The invoice shows zero tax (or we’d confuse the UK tax inspectors). The high net charge now reflects the fact we have to pay your country’s tax, but our payment platform doesn’t let us separate it on the invoice.

So how does the postal service know that tax has been paid? The Customs declaration gets a special registration code, an IOSS number, which tells officials that it’s been taxed, and who has paid the tax. The postal label gets an IOSS badge on it that alerts Customs to this. The individual EU Member States have now had some time to get used to this system, so they will usually just deliver the package as they should, and you won’t have to wait or pay anything.

(Incidentally, VAT in Europe varies mostly between about 17% and 25% depending on the country. This averages closely enough to the UK’s rate of 20% that we base our expenses on that.)

If you want to order more than one head tracker, the above doesn’t apply. The IOSS system is permitted only for packages worth €150 or less, which is one head tracker at a time.

If you order two, we split the order into two and send it as two separate parcels, which is permitted. As this quickly gets expensive, orders of three or more are sent by a private courier (usually UPS). UPS pays your local tax, adds its own fee, and charges Supperware what it needs to. Again we take care of this so there is nothing for you to pay on delivery.

We state on our Customs invoice that the head trackers are worth £65 each, because this is the correct net value. You pay £78 like our UK customers because your local duties, taxes and fees aren’t part of the value of the product.

If you want a PDF copy of the payment platform’s sales invoice for bookkeeping reasons, we’ll happily provide this.

Now, if you’re a business …

The rules change (or are ‘clarified’) all the time.

Business-to-business transactions between the UK and EU are not always exempt from VAT. You will need an EORI number to register as an importer. If your business doesn’t have one, most countries seem to charge €50 to obtain such a number, so it may not be worthwhile to do so.

Either way, for single purchases, you may decide that the matter of VAT (currently £13 per head tracker) may not be worth the inconvenience, and you may choose to buy them from the web shop.

But, if you can use the contact form to provide:

  1. A shipping address, email and phone number;

  2. An EU VAT number and a EU EORI number;

  3. The quantity of head trackers you require;

  4. How you want the package to be sent (tracked mail or UPS: essentially about two weeks or about one week)

we’ll draw up a pro forma invoice at the net price plus shipping, provide a Stripe payment link (if you want to pay by card), and we can do business that way instead.

Why don’t we have distributors? The short answer is that it wouldn’t be a better experience either for Supperware or our customers. Instead of navigating this bureaucratic ocean of import/export rules for every region where we trade, we’d be applying the distributor’s commission to each sale, so prices would have to increase anyway. Currently we have no good reason to move manufacturing from the UK, but the head tracker costs little enough not to attract attention and fits through a letterbox, so international logistics aren’t hard or expensive. That said, we’re always open to conversations of this kind if it improves everybody’s experience.

Still got questions? Get in touch!