Category: Taxes

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New eBay Store – works around UK VAT issues

I spent quite a few hours trying to get my shopping cart to be in compliance with the new UK rules regarding collection and reporting of the VAT taxes and finally decided the easiest solution was to just let eBay do it for me.  They already have everything in place for handling international shipping and taxes, including VAT, so I spent a few hours setting up a store and moving a few items into it.

This is the the URL:

https://www.ebay.com/str/corshamtechnologies

If you are in the UK, please use the eBay store.  For anyone else, it doesn’t matter whether you use my main website (where you are now) or eBay.  If you want to order something that is not on the eBay store yet just let me know so I can add the product over there.  Who knows, this might increase the number of orders too.  Having my current low profile web page kept the number of orders of lower which allowed more time for other projects but maybe I can off-load some of the work if there are more orders.  This is an experiment, so we’ll see how it works out.

Again, if you want something from my main pages that does not appear in the eBay store, just let me know so I can add an entry for it on eBay.

 

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Brexit Chaos

Effective immediately, we are no longer shipping to any UK address due to new requirements for collection of VAT taxes.  The rest of Europe is still easy for shipping, but anything going to a UK country now has additional taxes.  Given that I am an engineer, not a tax expert, my understanding of the rather lengthy and unclear rules indicates that different countries require me to file forms (some electronically, some in paper) with each of those countries, and the rates being charged vary by the amount of the sale.

My shopping cart software also needs to be updated and there appears to be a requirement to subscribe to a service which will compute the tax rate for a given delivery address.  All of this will take time and money to get set up, and I already have other things on my to-do list that need to be taken care of.

BTW I got an email from my shopping cart software vendor earlier this week saying “starting today you need to collect VAT taxes… upgrade your software again, read the rules, and good luck.”  I am still trying to understand the changes.