Great News! VAT reduced !!!

snip

Unfortunatley not quite true, you are paying VAT to Luxembourg and not to our VAT man. Ebay fees have not altered, so it still costs you the same, but Ebay make an extra 2.1/2%.

Andy M

It's the fact that you start with a vat inclusive price.

If the fee is 117.5, that is clearly 100 + 17.5%,

but the 17.5 VAT is very nearly 15% of 117.5

Might this be anything to do with paypal operating from Luxembourg now? maybe other parts of Ebay business are being conducted outside of UK? Just a thought.

Bob

On or around Sun, 3 Jun 2007 09:19:19 +0100, "Andrew Mawson" enlightened us thusly:

EU vat is charged at the rate pertaining in the selling country. Buying stuff for Germany, for example, I pay 19% which is the rate there.

However, I suspect the thing you've got is just a cockup and/or very out of date.

That is the one - VAT is charged at the rate applicable in the host country - but I've not yet found out how to get the bills zero rated as I'm VAT register in the UK so they should not apply any VAT :(

You should give them your UK vat no.Then you declare the purchase on your vat return under imported goods and pay the vat here.

In article , Austin Shackles writes

This is correct if you obtain goods from another EU country for private (i.e. non-VAT registered) purposes. If the recipient is VAT registered, and notifies the supplier of his VAT number, the supplier is supposed to supply them net of tax; the customer then charges himself with UK VAT in his VAT return, and simultaneously claims the input tax as a deduction (assuming the normal rules on allowability are met).

The position for receiving services is vastly more complex, and depends on the exact nature of the services received, but as far as I can decipher the arcane wording the supply of web-based auction services (such as eBay) should follow the same rule as for goods, above.

VAT, as practised in the EU, must be one of the stupid, obscure and difficult human constructs ever inflicted on the human race. It almost makes me hope for an afterlife, so that the people responsible may suffer appropriate punishment there.

David

from David Littlewood

Then you hould think yourself lucky that you were not trading when Purchase Tax was in use!

V.A.T. was like a breath of fresh air with one rate for all goods that were standard rated and essentially only four posible catagories - Standard, Zero, Exempt & Outside Scope. Amittedly there have been changes with the addition of the 5% energy band but in general V.A.T. is still a vastly superior system to administer compared with Purchase Tax.

There were a miriad of different rates and some products had different rates according to what the end use was capable of. My knowledge is based only on the printing industry but it is still typical of the traps laid for the unwarey. Business cards were chargeable at 16 5/8 % of the wholesale cost of the materials used unless there was a space left on the card amounting to greater than 25% of the area for the card for the 'rep' to write on; in which case the rate was 25 1/8% - again of the wholesale cost of the materials.

Often, this meant that I would buy materials at wholesale specifying that they were intended for a particular purpose (and pay purchase tax at the rate appropriate) but because not all of that material was used for that job I had to account for a change of use and a different rate for the remaining material.

JG

I'm still trying to get Paypal to ADD VAT correctly on baskets from European customers. THAT does not have any means of supplying a VAT number, and I can have orders from the same country at the same time - one with VAT one without. They simply do not understand how VAT works :(

I've not found where you enter the VAT number for eBay yet ;)