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by gregdoesit 1174 days ago
I do wonder if Brexit and customs to be paid for all of the EU has anything to do with this decision.

Book Depsitory is based in the UK. I have inadvertently ordered from them, to the Netherlands, as they had a “Bookdepository NL” store, which made it seem like they are an EU entity.

However, when the book arrived, I was hit by unexpected customs charges that were half the price of the book. Looking at recent reviews, there was a surge of these complaints from all customers in the Netherlands [1]

Perhaps the timing on these customs surges are accidental, of course. But I can’t imagine that Brexit helped with their EU sales.

[1] https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1638824647390003206

4 comments

I think books should be exempt from import taxes into the EU -- at least, the ones I ordered from the UK a while ago had a yellow sticker saying that, and Denmark didn't charge me any fees.

However, if even 1% or 0.1% of orders gets incorrectly taxed that could lead to negative reviews and put people off.

I've never ever had to pay VAT at the customs for Book Depository orders in Finland. My most recent order came in March and I had a pre-order for June.
Are books VAT free in Finland? They are in the UK and Ireland so I have never had customs either (in Ireland). Perhaps they are not VAT free in NL.
Books are in the lowered VAT category of 10%. There's very few things in Finland that are actually VAT free.

Ebooks used to be in the general VAT category of 24% but I think they've fixed that now.

I haven't in Norway either, but books are exempt from VAT.
Are books VAT free in NL? If not that's probably why.
Books are not VAT free. On a €15 book I ended up getting charged €9 for customs: €1 for the reduced VAT for books €6.50 for the customs handling fee €1.50 for VAT on the customs handling fee

So it’s the customs handling fee being added that’s contributed to the price increase. Seems like the Netherlands started to enforce it for even small value orders from the UK.

Leave a negative review for your government thats a ridiculous amount of charges for an import.
Ha! It would be interesting to see Trustpilot for governments. Im sure not many would have a very positive rating.
It might be a UPS issue, i've bought books from BD and didn't have to deal with customs or pay anything extra.