There is a difference between items which are not subject to VAT and items which are subject to VAT, but zero rated. The latter case still has to be reported for VAT.
I thought if buying off a platform such as Amazon or ebay, all this is supposed to be billed by the platform upfront at the time of purchase?
I will soon know, because having received a code for £10 off £25, I did an order yesterday on amazon uk for delivery to Fr.
Thanks @RicePudding - I’d just found it but you got there first! So for magazines arriving from the UK we are likely to be charged TVA on arrival but at a reduced rate?
be careful with that… the product may be at a reduced rate but any “service” charge - such as carriage, post and handling etc - will be at the full rate. The merchant may just apply the full rate for simplicity if their systems do not have the sophistication to split the rates… Nothing illegal in that, provided always they correctly report the VAT or TVA collected. If overcharged on VAT/TVA it is a matter between the consumer and the merchant to resolve.
Overcharging the VAT and misreporting what was collected is illegal.
Are you talking about what the merchant does or what we get charged on receipt. As I may have said before, a lot of us are trying to source goods from within the EU but specialist magazines are a different category altogether. Most of them already have worldwide distribution so it’s difficult to tell what costs are factored in already and which might be additional, in which case we’ll pay on receipt (or via LaPoste if we can with reduced handling charges)
@graham …you are very right…as ever with your considered view! Its not the VAT aka TVA that will be the issue after all I’m sure we can live on circa 2% on €10…but all the handling charges etc which I think will add at least €10 to all received items plus going to get it if no one is home when Postie arrives.
Also privately sent items will have to go through the manual process so maybe Xmas presents will have to be “cash to buy to buy youself something”. Individuals won’t do IOSS.
Just another Brexit present that is making us wonder how long we can manage the crap.
Life here is not know what we thought.
The unfortunate answer is to use Amazon for the country you want.
We do this already for birthday presents to UK or pay money into their bank account.
We sold up entirely in UK when we moved here, but have a bank account and a UK credit card.
Like luck, where you have to make your own - living in France is what you make it…
interesting that the wholesale closure of bank accounts seems not yet to have started for people without uk adresses
yes thats what we are doing, just means less opportunity to send French themed stuff from here
not really… the negotiations re “services” which will include banking are still in a state of flux between the UK and EU. Meanwhile, a lot has changed over banking services for non UK residents - in the main they are more “market forces” influenced than Brexit forced.
Can you imagine what will happen with all the people who work for La Poste?
Jim has just done a back of a fag packet calculation that , having read that there are 450 million items in this category it will take two to three more thousand staff, as someone has to pick it up, read it, scan it and put it down again.
I can see this causing major disruption as this is not just applicable to goods coming from UK but worldwide.
and Jim is quite right - he infers that the cost of Brexit to innocent workers and systems worldwide is immense - Liz Truss may have to give some “pay back” when negotiating trade deals with so affected Countries once they realise the impact.
I can’t see the Postal Workers Union objecting to having more members.
It’s just more tax collected by governments allowing job creation of all these non-productive jobs weighting down the European economy.
The winners so far seem to be courier and post office companies with relatively massive flat rate surcharges like 10-15 euros on a cheap item incurrring 2 euros or less tax. This was why the 35 Euro exemption made sense.
Like @strudball if too much goes this way then life in France may become less pleasant
We don’t have a UK address.
No, but I thought that the ides was to cut down on civil servants, or are posties not civil servants.
I look on it this way, I moved to France because I love the country, people and way of life, I knew there would have to be some comprising done and this is one of the minor things to deal with.
We just find a way around it, use either eBay or Amazon or any company in the UK for birthday/Xmas presents, the knitting that my partner does for people back home she will do in advance and either take it back to the UK ourselves when we go back or get a visitor to take it back for us and post it in the UK.
I can get virtually everything from eBay/Mano Mano/Amazon in the EU or use AliExpress, it isn’t a big deal for us and certainly wouldn’t make me think about going back to the UK 
I don’t go out of my way looking for any negatives about living here
Exactly.
Doesn’t seem to be working well, does it? 
Not a good state though.
I completely agree with @Griffin36 on this one. We moved to France permanently once it became all too apparent we would have to choose which country we would be living in. We chose France for much the same reasons as Colin. However, it was done in the knowledge that we would be paying a price for our choice, whichever way we went. The price we pay for being here is (mainly) financial and a certain amount of convenience.
Prior to Brexit, it was possible to buy whatever was cheaper in either country - “best of both worlds”. Now it no longer is. For me (with roots not just completely UK but contained within just 3 counties for the past 4 hundred years at least) I have my friends and my native culture and my heritage from the UK and I have the culture and people and social structure of France. This makes me rich although financially certainly not so.
For other people with a lot of family in the UK and different priorities the price we are paying may not be worth it. For me, it is.
Don’t think it is a matter of live in France V UK as people settling here like us obviously did so out of choice. What we are struggling with is that we expected to be able to keep a foot in both camps. Live and love France yet not abandon England where we have lifelong friends and family. I know some people decide to sever all old ties…we have some good friends here who have done that.
What distresses us is that we are going to have to nail our flag to the French mast or the English one not to a European one as hoped.
Our future son in law is an Italian vet in London and takes the same view …loves London (and our daughter!) but doesn’t want to cut off from Italian culture and his family but embrace both and of course it enriches our daughter as she has a London and Milan life…or did,