One-Stop-Shop & EU trade: when you should register

The registration for the newly introduced EU One-Stop-Shop regulation needs to be carefully considered. For many traders in the EU, the OSS simplifies VAT obligations, for others the situation becomes more complicated. You can find out more about this in the following article.

One Stop Shop in EU and home sales

If you only send products from your home country to customers in other EU countries as part of your online trade, you should use the EU One-Stop-Shop. In this case, you save yourself VAT registrations and filing of advance VAT returns in all countries in which your customers are based. All these tasks will then be taken over by the EU One-Stop-Shop process. If you are an online retailer based in Germany and the OSS could be worthwhile for you, you can find more information about the process of the One-Stop-Shop in Germany on our blog.

One-Stop-Shop and EU-wide storage

However, if you trade across the EU and store in other EU countries, you should think twice about signing-up for the One-Stop-Shop. Because an exception to the One Stop Shop in the EU is the storage of products in foreign warehouses. In this case, despite OSS registration, the country-specific fulfillment of VAT tasks is necessary. In our blog post with One-Stop-Shop examples you can find out which deliveries have to appear in the One-Stop-Shop return and which have to appear in regular VAT returns.

One Stop Shop and EU FBA programs

The use of Fulfilled-by-Amazon programs represents exactly such a foreign warehouse structure and is therefore an exception to the EU One-Stop-Shop. In addition, however, Amazon sellers do not always know which country and warehouse their goods are stored in before being delivered in the course of an FBA program. Therefore, VAT registrations are necessary in all countries that are included in the respective FBA program. In this case, an additional registration for the One Stop Shop for EU-wide cross-border selling complicates the sorting of transactions when preparing reports – and is therefore only worthwhile in a few cases. You can find out more about the One-Stop-Shop for Amazon sellers on our blog.

Regardless of whether a registration for the OSS sounds interesting to you or you are not yet sure, contact our hellotax team! We will discuss the options with you and can show you how the fulfillment of OSS obligations in the EU can be simplified very easily.