I had a quote the other day for about 600EUROS of castors from Germany and they wanted to slap a 42EURO 'customs declaration' charge on the order. I thought UK-EU agreed a FTA at the 11th hour?
its not that simple I'm afraid
there will be no duty/tariffs, but that does not mean no import costs..... you will still be charged for clearing customs & of course VAT which now has to be checked at the borders... its all extra work. .... a whole heap of new admin to be done for both sides so we are seeing customs charges fly up.... based upon the complexity of the deal they ahve hammered out & the way HMRC wants the EU to handle VAT (i go into this abit more below) its actualy more complcated & labour intensive than WTO rules, which we knew the cost of before, what we are doiling with now is completely unknown & we are realizing the costs we realise the workload
EU companies that sell to the UK are now expected to register for VAT in the UK & complete a quarterly return & pay HMRC for sales of a certain value...or on other higher value instances expected not deduct the VAT and sell items ex vat for HMRC to collect VAT at the border.... so yet again more admin to do, which all costs.
couriers such as DPD have already added their own extra admin charges onto consignments for customs clearance (or they did until the suspended EU & UK road services last week as 50% of consignments were getting rejected at both sides of borders due to in complete or incorrect customs paperwork)
The fact is the deal happening at the last minute has thrown everyone big & small in at the deep end and as of mid last week no one knew what they were doing.... we needed a deal or no deal to be established long before the transition period was over to be able to get things sorted & systems in place.
I have suspended EU shipping for my business as we currently are still working out what its going to cost us & the issues at the border are not settling down yet.... my EU suppliers (wood, metalwork, etc) have all done the same but some of them are now considering completely stopping UK supply as the turn over for the Uk alone is not looking like its worth the workload.... i understand this ass im looking at the same quandary
my advice to anyone right now, is hold off buying anything from the EU if you can.... we need suppliers, couriers/import/export agents & the boarder teams to actualy work out what they arer doing & what it costs, at this time we are flying by the skin of our pants.