UK to EU - Issues with delivering & clearing customs for Spain orders

[carmehomeltd]

Hello,

We’re struggling to get parcels through customs and into Spain, even when we’re providing full clearance documents, tax codes for the customers etc. It just gets stuck there “pending further information” but we never find out what it is they need and it gets returned back to us.

Essentially, we want to know if any other sellers have had issues with shipments into Spain specifically, and if they’ve had issues, have they resolved them, and how? If they’ve had problems, what are they?

I look forward to hearing from anyone who experienced similar case,
Thank you,
Tom

 

[Paul FilmMaker]

This was my job prior to the formation of the EU. I was employed in a bank as an import clerk in France, mainly on high value British goods being imported into France. What's happened is Brexit has set the rules back 30 years to the rules in 1992.

What happened is that customs simply didn't care and couldn't be bothered to process goods correctly even if the goods were correctly labelled. Why should they? It's just extra work for them. Far easier for them just to 'lose' the item. For higher value goods, like cherry pickers, heavy machinery etc... they hired clerks like me to figure out where the goods were, find them and then get them unstuck. As an example, it once took me 9 months to unstick a computer held up in customs.

It doesn't matter if all the paperwork is in order, customs will still turn it away for no reason.

It requires specialised 'clerical' knowledge. E.g. In France, I used to deal with a lot of 732s. What that meant was the piece of heavy machinery couldn't just be 'lost', so they were being sent 300 miles inland to a customs depot at Poitiers. This was known as a 732 because the customs depot was 732. The Poitiers customs officers were hand picked for their nastiness and threatened me on multiple occasions. I couldn't do anything about it because my job was to get the thing they were holding onto. It was a horrible job but that's why I was employed.

With Brexit, the identical issue has arisen. British exports are getting turned back even if the paperwork is perfect. What you need is someone who knows the Spanish system and then pay them to chase goods when customs mess you around. That's the business solution and yes, it will cost you around £35,000 a year all-in to pay that export clerk (or import clerk because they need to be based in Spain). It's just an additional cost of doing business now we've left the EU.

 

[Deleted member 335660]

Hi Tom,

I live in Spain and we have had similar problems.

We ordered natural soaps from Scotland and they were sent back. We ordered some electric oil burners ( home fragrance) and they got turned back. I thought these may be down to chemical and electrical standards issues.

However, we successfully get orders delivered for golf accessories, greetings cards and other things.

We are also having trouble with excessive tax demands for jewellery.

So we have tended to move to wholesale portals that are based in EU take care of these issues ( faire.com).

 

[capacitum.com]

Hi
We had a look into this as we had major issues in July 2021 even after being IOSS registered. Customs would reject parcel or charge customers taxes and duty etc. It was a huge mess and very costly.

Shipping from the EU, with goods stored in the EU requires one to be VAT registered in the country your goods will be stored in. So for example if you are going to use a 3pl or open your warehouse in say France, you will need to be VAT registered in France. Then if you are going to sell in other EU countries, not just France then you also have to register for OSS so you can collect the taxes on your online store checkout.

Then each month you will need to provide the necessary sales information to the company that will be handling your VAT returns and OSS submissions and pay the taxes you have collected from each countries sales. Remember VAT rates are different in each EU country so you really want a web platform that can handle that or open an individual store aimed for that specific country.

After looking through all of our options we opted for FRANCE, as it didn't require fiscal representation, it seemed like the quickest time to get our registrations in place and it was the closest to the UK so sending our goods from here to there would be "cheaper and quicker".

We are now able to send our goods to the whole of EU much faster than we ever could from the UK, we can ship to Ireland and other EU countries in 1 day and overall our customers are much happier.

I hope this information helps