Selling to consumers across the EU

The threshold is EUR 10,000, and it is lower than it looks

If you ship from the Netherlands to private customers elsewhere in the EU, you may keep charging Dutch VAT as long as your combined turnover to all those countries stays under EUR 10,000. That is a total, not a per-country figure.

Two things are routinely missed. The amount is exclusive of VAT, and two years are tested: you must stay below it in the current calendar year and must also have stayed below it in the preceding one. A strong 2025 puts you in the foreign regime from the first day of 2026.

Digital services to consumers count towards the same threshold: downloads, remote courses, subscriptions. One pot, not two.

What happens on the day you cross it

The switch does not wait for the end of the quarter or the end of the year. It applies to the very supply that crosses the line, and that order already carries your customer's local rate.

From then on you charge per destination: 19% in Germany, 20% in France, 21% in Belgium, 22% in Italy. Your pricing no longer holds if you show one figure everywhere.

There is no transitional relief and no grace period, which turns tracking turnover per country into a pricing decision rather than an administrative detail.

What the One Stop Shop solves

Without it you would register in every country where you have customers, with local returns, local deadlines and local correspondence. With it you report everything in a single quarterly return to the Dutch tax authorities, who forward the money to the other member states.

One registration, one quarterly return, one payment. That is the whole benefit, and it is a substantial one.

And what it does not solve

The scheme only works while your goods leave from the Netherlands. If your stock sits in a foreign warehouse, the position changes:

• Shipping from a German or Polish warehouse makes that country the country of departure, which in principle requires a registration there
• Using a fulfilment provider that spreads your stock across countries moves your VAT position with it, without you noticing
• Sales to business customers fall outside the scheme and run through the regular return and the EC Sales List
• Domestic Dutch sales stay in your ordinary VAT return

This shift is the error we encounter most often: a webshop grows, moves to foreign fulfilment, and finds out a year later that a filing obligation arose in two countries.

Staying below the threshold can cost you money

You may opt into your customer's local VAT even while below EUR 10,000. That is often sensible: if you sell heavily into Germany, 19% German VAT beats 21% Dutch VAT, and those two points are your margin.

You notify the inspector of that choice and it then binds you for at least two calendar years. It is a decision to get right once, not a switch to flip each quarter.

What we do

We start by establishing where your goods physically depart from, because that is where the answer begins. We then handle the One Stop Shop registration, the quarterly return and the reconciliation with your regular VAT return.

An OSS return costs EUR 145 per quarter and the registration EUR 325 once. Within a monthly package the quarterly work is included.