Something is wrong with mouser

[peter-h]

I am still waiting for a Mouser ordered from 12 Feb. It is with Fedex, now in the UK, and stuck in some sort of customs processing, they say.

The track log shows it was notified to Fedex on 19th Feb.

[JohnnyMalaria]

I am still waiting for a Mouser ordered from 12 Feb. It is with Fedex, now in the UK, and stuck in some sort of customs processing, they say.

The track log shows it was notified to Fedex on 19th Feb.

That's probably more to do with Boris' change to import duty etc creating post-Brexit chaos.

I'm curious - did Mouser collect VAT?

For imports of goods from outside the UK in consignments not exceeding £135 in value (which aligns with the threshold for customs duty liability), we will be moving the point at which VAT is collected from the point of importation to the point of sale. This will mean that UK supply VAT, rather than import VAT, will be due on these consignments.

The new arrangements will also involve the abolition of Low Value Consignment Relief, which relieves import VAT on consignments of goods valued at £15 or less.

Online marketplaces (OMPs), where they are involved in facilitating the sale, will be responsible for collecting and accounting for the VAT.

For goods sent from overseas and sold directly to UK consumers without OMP involvement, the overseas seller will be required to register and account for the VAT to HMRC.

This is why Louis Rossmann, for example, has decided to no longer sell to UK customers.

[SilverSolder]

I am still waiting for a Mouser ordered from 12 Feb. It is with Fedex, now in the UK, and stuck in some sort of customs processing, they say.

The track log shows it was notified to Fedex on 19th Feb.

That's probably more to do with Boris' change to import duty etc creating post-Brexit chaos.

I'm curious - did Mouser collect VAT?

For imports of goods from outside the UK in consignments not exceeding £135 in value (which aligns with the threshold for customs duty liability), we will be moving the point at which VAT is collected from the point of importation to the point of sale. This will mean that UK supply VAT, rather than import VAT, will be due on these consignments.

The new arrangements will also involve the abolition of Low Value Consignment Relief, which relieves import VAT on consignments of goods valued at £15 or less.

Online marketplaces (OMPs), where they are involved in facilitating the sale, will be responsible for collecting and accounting for the VAT.

For goods sent from overseas and sold directly to UK consumers without OMP involvement, the overseas seller will be required to register and account for the VAT to HMRC.

This is why Louis Rossmann, for example, has decided to no longer sell to UK customers.

Yeah, the red tape hating Brexiters are protecting their country by wrapping it safely in red tape! 

[peter-h]

Oh dear, the usual degradation to the usual remoaner comments

"That's probably more to do with Boris' change to import duty etc creating post-Brexit chaos."

I don't think so for US to UK shipments. People should get better informed!

It is only online retailers in the EU, and only if shipping under £135 (IIRC), who are supposed to register with UK HMRC, add the VAT, and send it over to the UK. For the US to UK or vice versa, things have always been simple, and remain so. Above this value, they don't add VAT and it is collected by the shipping agent, just like on imports from the US, or the rest of the world actually. The EU is just a small blob on the map.

There is also no import duty on EU-UK trade, with the exception of personal import. B2B is totally unaffected, although a lot of mainland sellers bought into the bull and make the problems a lot bigger. There is also a lot of hate of the UK on the mainland for having rocked the boat, so some sellers are trying to do ripoffs. Way excessive shipping charges are not uncommon. For US to UK we have always had the problem that many US sellers don't sell outside the US (too much effort) but Mouser had this well sorted out.

Hopefully it is just the bad wx, leading to a backlog. But also Fedex is not the best company; DHL is much better organised.

Mouser UK add VAT to their invoices, yes.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Hopefully it is just the bad wx, leading to a backlog. But also Fedex is not the best company; DHL is much better organised.

In my experience, DHL is better if you are a recipient in Europe and FedEx is better if you are in the US. Every DHL shipment addressed to me in the US since 2005 has been plagued with problems including two instances of the shipment just vanishing.

[Howardlong]

Mouser switched to charging VAT up front for UK VAT registered entities sometime in December 2020 as they switched away from using their EU entity and the intra-EU B2B VAT process to using Mouser UK.

Digikey have always charged VAT up front as long as I can recollect.

There's no net difference, as a business you simply offset the VAT each quarter as you'd normally do.

As a small business, the B2B UK => (Non UK) EU VAT accounting anomaly was a minor but not insignificant additional bit of red tape, where, as a business you were responsible for verifying the VAT credentials of your EU business customer before you could issue an invoice with VAT deducted. As such, far from being "frictionless" it was always an additional manual process for SMEs, and it frequently led to delays in shipping for the paperwork and communication to be completed.

I never found an off the shelf eCommerce solution to deal with this automatically, although large enterprises of course have the resources to build their own automated solutions. As it stands now, in 2021, all non-GB shipments are sent out in the same way with the same process, so that old B2B intra EU VAT verification process has now gone.

Whether DHL/UPS/Fedex are the way to go seems to be tribal based largely on anecdotal evidence as far as I can see. Certainly I've stuck with Fedex for my international shipping for a decade now: I understand their systems and I continue to enjoy a substantial discount. I only very, very rarely have any Fedex related problems. If I shifted to another logistics supplier, I'd have to re-learn their systems and rebuild my interfaces. If I were a large enterprise where my volume justified it, of course I'd be putting this out to tender on a regular basis, but as an SME I have bigger fish to fry.

What I would say is that Digikey/UPS deliveries to me seem to be faster than Mouser/Fedex nowadays, although the opposite used to be true say four or five years ago. Digikey/UPS used to be typically three days with Mouser/Fedex a pretty reliable two days. The tables have now turned, Digikey/UPS is two days and Mouser/Fedex three.

[peter-h]

We have for many years had the ability to invoice zero VAT to an EU customer who supplied a valid VAT number, but the site used to validate these (which our Magento online shop would access automatically, with some customisation) was not 100% reliable.

Before we started using the auto facility and were processing orders manually we would sometimes end up losing the VAT, because the VAT number would turn to be invalid later. Thankfully this was very rare in our business but we never recovered the VAT from those people afterwards (obviously!).

Now this system is gone and we invoice zero VAT to the EU which makes life a lot simpler.

But there have always been vastly bigger problems selling into mainland Europe, than the paperwork. The major countries have different languages, different cultures, etc, etc. In most of them one makes little progress unless one appoints a good local agent, and that's a huge hassle.

I like Mouser because they have a good website with a good search facility. I've tried Digikey but for some reason decided to stay with Mouser.

[Howardlong]

We have for many years had the ability to invoice zero VAT to an EU customer who supplied a valid VAT number, but the site used to validate these (which our Magento online shop would access automatically, with some customisation) was not 100% reliable.

Interesting. TBF, it has indeed been some years since I last looked at ecommerce solutions. One of the pre requisites I needed at the time was a way to capture basic contact details for pre-orders without taking any money, I could only find one product a the time that offered this feature, and even then it was very primitive. I'm not comfortable about taking money for a product I don't actually have in stock, although it seems to be de rigeur nowadays. This isn't just an honesty thing, it's also because once you take money you have entered into a contract, and immediately need the overhead of a small army of customer support agents to deal with the inevitable cancelled orders and understandable deluge of chase up communication.