German Customs - paying duty

[robbtyke132010]

I received this message today from a customer in Germany:

I just received your package and had to pay customs €7.11 to the postman on receipt. That makes this 6th series DVD pretty expensive for me at a combined cost of over €30. When I saw you were asking a fairly hefty price for it, I assumed you had included duty and shipping costs. I just bought the entire 1st to 4th series for under €70 from someone in Germany, so you can see why I'm disappointed with this deal. Needless to say, I won't be ordering from you again.

For the last 14 years I have sent hundreds of DVDs to Germany pre & post Brexit but never had a problem. Obviously eBay has taken customs duty upfront - is there any extra information I need to include on the customs form? Has anyone else been in a similar position?

[rjwilmsi]

Was this sale a GSP sale (you sent to UK hub in Lichfield), or a direct sale whereby you posted yourself to Germany?

[robbtyke132010]

Posted myself.

[4_bathrooms]

---

@robbtyke132010 wrote:

Posted myself.

---

How did you pay for the postage?

As the sale was under €150 eBay should have charged and remitted the buyer's domestic VAT when the buyer purchased. If Deutsche Post have charged a handling fee and additional VAT it suggests there was a problem with the customs form (CN22).

[wellingnorth]

How did you buy the postage?

For any European parcels I use Royal Mail Click and Drop which after initial teething problems has recently has been quite reliable electronically encoding the customs / IOSS data.  Of course it could be also an error in German customs.

At this point what may be doing is going on chat with ebay customer services and explaining that your buyer has had to pay VAT again when the parcel arrived. I think they should then give you a link where he'll be able to upload the receipt for ebay to refund him the VAT that he paid on the transaction if not any handling fees (at least this is what happened the last time I had a problem with this).

If you did buy the label online and have a copy you could get in touch with Royal Mail and ask them if the IOSS details were encoded properly, they may offer you some kind of refund - I had some where this had failed to happen and they refunded me the postage price I think.