Selling Across Borders: An eCommerce Checklist for the New Import Rules

Before you ship a single parcel to a new country, work out the landed cost: product, freight, import VAT, duty and any handling fee the carrier adds. Then decide, in writing, whether you collect that at checkout or let the courier collect it at the door. Everything else on this list is detail. Getting that one decision wrong produces refused deliveries, angry emails and a return you pay for twice.

Landed cost is the only number that matters

Landed cost is the total a customer pays to have your product in their hands, legally cleared. Five components, every time: the price of the goods, outbound freight, import VAT or sales tax, customs duty, and the carrier’s clearance or handling charge. That last one surprises people most, because it is set by the courier rather than the customs authority and it does not scale with the order value.

Build a spreadsheet with one row per destination and one column per component, then fill it in for a cheap order and an expensive order. The pattern you will usually find is that small cross-border orders are uneconomic once clearance costs are real, which is an argument for a minimum order value rather than for giving up on the market.

Cross-border is also still a minority sport, which is worth knowing before you build the whole business on it. Eurostat’s survey covering 2021 found 18.5% of EU enterprises made web sales to customers in their own country, 8.1% to customers in other EU countries and 4.6% to the rest of the world.

The EU: IOSS, the 150 euro line and what changes from 2026

Two EU dates matter. On 1 July 2021 the VAT exemption for imported goods below 22 euro was abolished, and an import declaration became necessary for every parcel entering the EU regardless of value. In exchange, the Commission introduced the Import One-Stop Shop for distance sales of imported goods in consignments with an intrinsic value not exceeding 150 euro, plus a simplified customs declaration using roughly a third of the data elements of a full one.

The practical effect of IOSS is that you charge the destination country’s VAT rate at checkout, file one monthly return through a single member state, and your parcels clear without the customer being asked for money on arrival. Without it, your customer pays import VAT plus the carrier’s handling fee at the door, which is where the refused deliveries come from.

The second date is the one to plan for now. On 13 November 2025 the Commission announced that the 150 euro customs-duty exemption will be removed in 2026, describing the exemption as no longer justified and a source of unfair competition with traditional retail. The same announcement commits to a simple interim method for calculating duty until mid-2028, when the EU Customs Data Hub is due to provide it properly, and references the Council’s June 2025 mandate for an e-commerce handling fee from November 2026.

The United States: duty-free de minimis is gone

If you sell into the United States, the biggest change in years already happened. Executive Order 14324 suspended duty-free de minimis treatment for goods from all countries, and US Customs and Border Protection confirmed the effective date as 29 August 2025. Goods valued at or below USD 800 that would previously have entered free of duty are now subject to applicable duties, taxes and fees.

In practice that means three things for a non-US seller. Your US customers may now face a charge they never used to see. Your carrier needs accurate classification and country-of-origin data on every shipment, because the duty calculation depends on it. And the economics of shipping a USD 30 item individually to the US have changed enough that it is worth re-checking whether you want to.

The United Kingdom: the 135 pound rule

The UK runs its own threshold and it is lower than the EU’s. HMRC’s guidance for overseas sellers is that consignments valued at 135 pounds or less, sold directly to customers in Great Britain rather than through an online marketplace, have UK supply VAT charged at the point of sale. Above 135 pounds, normal import VAT and customs rules apply on importation.

Three details catch people out. The 135 pound limit applies to the whole consignment, not to each item in it, so splitting an order across lines does not help. The intrinsic value excludes separately itemised transport and insurance. And the old low-value consignment relief for goods at 15 pounds or less is gone. HMRC also expects records to be kept for six years, and a business customer who supplies a UK VAT number is handled under the reverse charge instead.

Selling inside the EU: the 10,000 euro threshold

Selling from inside the EU to consumers in other member states is a different scheme again. Below a 10,000 euro annual threshold, intra-EU distance sales of goods and telecommunications, broadcasting and electronic services may stay subject to VAT in the member state where you are established, as the Commission’s One Stop Shop guidance sets out. Above it, you charge the customer’s own country rate and file through the OSS rather than registering in each state.

The threshold is cumulative across all member states and across both goods and the covered services, so a business that sells a little into several countries crosses it faster than it expects. Watch the running total monthly rather than discovering it at year end.

DDP or DDU: who meets the courier at the door

Delivered Duty Paid means you collect tax and duty at checkout and the parcel arrives with nothing left to pay. Delivered Duty Unpaid means the courier collects from your customer, usually with a handling fee attached, sometimes by text message, sometimes by leaving a card and taking the parcel back to a depot.

DDP costs you more to set up and wins on every other measure. It removes the worst post-purchase surprise, it cuts refused deliveries, and it makes your prices comparable to a domestic competitor’s. DDU is defensible when your order values are high, your destinations are few, and your customers are businesses who clear imports routinely.

Whichever you choose, say it on the product page and again in the basket. Hidden charges are the single largest documented cause of abandoned carts, which we cover with the numbers in our conversion-rate guide. The payment side matters here too: currency conversion and international card surcharges stack on top of duty, and our post on getting payments right sets out what the processors actually charge.

Returns are a customs process too

Returns are the part of cross-border selling that gets designed last and costs most. Start from the volume: the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns estimated in October 2025 that 19.3% of online sales would be returned that year, against 15.8% for retail overall.

A return crossing a border is an export, then an import. The EU’s rules do provide a facilitation: under the Union Customs Code’s delegated regulation, goods in postal consignments worth up to 1,000 euro that are not liable to export duty are deemed to be declared for export when they leave the customs territory, and express consignments up to the same value when presented at the office of exit. That removes a declaration, not the whole problem.

• Decide before launch whether you accept international returns at all, and say so plainly.
• Price the return journey into the product, or charge for it transparently. Do not promise free global returns you cannot fund.
• Use a returns address in or near the destination region where volume justifies it.
• Keep the original export paperwork so you can reclaim import VAT or duty where the rules allow it — your broker will tell you what evidence they need.
• Refund in the original currency and on the original payment method, so your customer is not absorbing a conversion loss on your mistake.

The checklist

Work down this list for each destination you intend to serve. If you cannot complete a line, that is the country you are not ready for yet.

1. Landed cost modelled for a low-value and a high-value order, including the carrier’s clearance fee.
2. Tax registration decided: IOSS for EU imports under 150 euro, OSS for intra-EU distance sales above the 10,000 euro threshold, UK VAT registration for direct sales at or under 135 pounds.
3. Commodity codes and country of origin recorded against every product, not guessed at dispatch.
4. DDP or DDU chosen, configured in the checkout, and stated on the product page.
5. Carrier selected per lane, with a written answer on who handles clearance and what they charge for it.
6. Returns route, address and funding agreed, including who pays the outbound tax on a refund.
7. Prices shown in local currency, with your conversion and card surcharges accounted for in the margin.
8. An accountant or customs broker engaged in any market where your annual volume will be material.

Trust is the thread running through all of it. A store that states its delivered price, its delivery window and its returns terms before the payment step converts better than one that hopes nobody asks — see building trust in your online store for the evidence. Eudora works with clients remotely worldwide, so we can set the tax, currency and shipping configuration up in your store without being in your country; our eCommerce services page explains how we scope that.

Tell us which countries you want to sell into and we will map the tax, duty and shipping setup your store needs, and tell you which lanes are not worth the paperwork yet. Get in touch with Eudora Technology to talk about your project.