VAT Registration in Germany and eBay and Amazon.
For a month now, eBay has been sending messages stating that from October 1, 2019, providing a German address as the product location by companies outside Germany will only be possible for companies that register as VAT payers in Germany:
“Due to changes in German VAT regulations, we must ask you to submit, by October 1 of this year, a certificate of VAT payer status in Germany if you want to continue selling in the German market.”
Last year, a similar situation concerned the United Kingdom. Companies specifying product location in the UK but not being VAT payers in that country had to change the location or register for UK VAT. Otherwise, specifying product location in the UK resulted in temporary suspension of the seller’s account until the company registered for UK VAT and sent appropriate explanations to eBay, or at best until declaring that sales and shipping take place from Poland, for example, and VAT registration in the UK is not required.
Last year, Amazon also began requiring VAT registration in the country where goods are stored.
The requirement from Amazon and eBay is nothing beyond the applicable law in the European Union. It should be remembered that despite the frequent practice of Polish companies entering English or German addresses as product location, the obligation to register for VAT in the country where goods are warehoused and from where they are shipped to customers has existed for a long time. Storing goods and shipping them from a member country other than the company’s country of registration is another factor, beyond exceeding annual turnover (for Germany it’s 100,000 euros per year) in a given country, that requires VAT registration.
