EU buyers - the end of VAT exemption (July 1, 2021)

I have already had a dubious pleasure of being double charged for a US item sold on eBay. It turns out that eBay started to offer their sellers a Global Shipping program in disguise; it's no longer openly called as such and the buyer sees a shipping option like "USPS Intl" or similar, however when purchasing an item you get an import VAT added to your bill. Then eBay collects the parcel and use local carriers to dispatch and deliver it. To cut the costs they may ship the items to one of their EU warehouses and from there re-dispatch them to a destination country.

The hitch is that during re-dispatching there may be a new shipping/tracking number assigned, which in turn will make your VAT payment detached from your shipment, and that's precisely what happened to me. And the Spanish Customs quite rightfully slapped me with the import VAT again.

Arguing with the Customs usually leads you nowhere (they cannot care less about a shipment's previous ID), so I had to spend some week pushing eBay to get a refund of the first VAT payment they had collected. After some heated discussions with the agents and blame shifting between eBay departments they reluctantly provided me with a form link to upload a confirmation of the second VAT payment (which I had settled at a local post office) and now I am waiting for the promised refund (which was supposed to take 21 days).

So... watch out when purchasing at eBay with their enforced import VAT collection.

 

BTW, @Sorcerer had already anticipated that.

 

Well done for disputing this. You should write this on one of those Ebay discussion boards so it becomes recorded and others who have experienced this know they can dispute it with Ebay and get a refund as it is completely Ebay's fault.

 

The seller took the CDs to same post office again, this time a different post officer and they didn't ask for DNI or equivalent, it can post to me with no problem!!!

Post officer yesterday was just on a little power-trip it seems!!