UK Vat Registered Business Selling overseas VAT Charged?

Majic

It's not been easy to clarify this with ebay. If you are a UK Vat registered business and you list an item that this purchased overseas, why would Ebay generate VAT on the customer invoice. Seems to happen on some invoices and not others. Could anyone advise?

DullGreyGuy

Because in some countries the law requires market places, like eBay, to charge their local VAT on orders under a certain value rather than the courier collecting it on importation when it will be coming into their country from outside of their tax regime. 

UK does the same now, so anything under £135 the seller has to collect the VAT (or the market place if sold via eBay, Amazon etc) if the seller is outside the UK and sending the goods into the UK. If it's over £135 then no sales VAT is applied at point of sale but the importer will have to pay duty and VAT on importation. 

Majic

DullGreyGuy said:

Because in some countries the law requires market places, like eBay, to charge their local VAT on orders under a certain value rather than the courier collecting it on importation when it will be coming into their country from outside of their tax regime. 

UK does the same now, so anything under £135 the seller has to collect the VAT (or the market place if sold via eBay, Amazon etc) if the seller is outside the UK and sending the goods into the UK. If it's over £135 then no sales VAT is applied at point of sale but the importer will have to pay duty and VAT on importation. 

Can you explain the requirement for the seller? If using ebay shop, is it a case of paying over any VAT generated by ebay on these sales overseas and ignoring the ones that have no VAT added in by ebay

DullGreyGuy

Lets say you are selling an item to a person in France for £100

As a UK VAT registered business you charge UK VAT at 0% for overseas sales. eBay will charge and keep the French VAT at 20% and eBay will pay that on to the French authorities. 

When you print of the forms from eBay it should include information confirming that French VAT has already been collected and so the customer receives it with no further charges to pay. 

Majic

DullGreyGuy said:

Lets say you are selling an item to a person in France for £100

As a UK VAT registered business you charge UK VAT at 0% for overseas sales. eBay will charge and keep the French VAT at 20% and eBay will pay that on to the French authorities. 

When you print of the forms from eBay it should include information confirming that French VAT has already been collected and so the customer receives it with no further charges to pay. 

We have an invoice to Japan on the invoice ebay have a net, vat and order total. Why is that not 0% and what do we do about the VAT, do we have to pay this over?

Majic

We've got odd examples of items being sold overseas where ebay have charged the customer vat. The amount we receive from ebay is Net+vat-fees. That cannot be right can it can it? We shouldn't have to pay any output tax over to HMRC?

Majic

An example would be we sell an amount for £10. If we sell that to UK Customer ebay correctly charges £2 and we receive £12 from customer. If the same item is sold to USA ebay charges the customer £12 (when this should be £10).