UK Shopping Post-Brexit

Consumer affairs expert Conor Pope explains the rules around VAT, customs and duties when ordering from UK websites.

Online shopping used to be such a simple affair. You’d log on to sites from Amazon to Zara, find all your heart desired, click, pay and then, as if by magic, the goodies would arrive at your front door.

You could shop from your couch while drinking wine and half-watching the Late Late Show on a Friday night and, if your slightly tipsy shopping choices turned out to be rubbish, you could just send everything back and get a full refund, no questions asked.

But then Brexit happened and ruined everything for everyone. Thanks for nothing  Boris. 

Since shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve – the moment when the UK formally left the EU – anyone shopping on websites based across the Irish Sea have faced delays, complicated paperwork and virtual doors slammed in their faces, as British companies decide not to do business with us.   

But the bottom line is the bottom line. Thanks to Brexit, shopping with UK-based retailers – and that is where most of our spending goes – will see people paying a whole lot more for clothes and tech and all the rest. 

According to the folk at Revenue if the value of the goods you buy goes above €22, VAT is payable and duty  applies for purchases over €150. So if you buy a nice jumper off a UK-based website for €167, it might end up costing you €236.32 once VAT and other charges are added to the price. The one exclusion is if goods are made in the UK, but that is not often the case. 

These extra charges can be imposed in different ways. Many online retailers in the UK will include any additional costs in the final price you pay at the time of purchase.  Retailers can alternatively charge the same price to you as they would to consumers in the UK, after which the carrier or postal service delivering the goods will have to complete custom formalities and the amount of VAT and duties will be calculated by customs based on the information they are given by the delivery company. 

You will then have to pay those charges to the carrier or the postal service. And if you don’t pay the postman, you don’t get the goods. It is that simple. 

This process is made even less attractive because not only will you have to pay the taxes, you will also have to pay the admin costs of the delivery company, which is likely to be at least a tenner a pop although it could be closer to €15.

All this palaver has taken most people by surprise. According to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, only 15 per cent of consumers understood that buying from non-EU websites attracted higher taxes and charges.

But higher prices are not the only problem. 

EU Consumer Protection law gives Irish consumers the right to change their mind after they receive their purchases and other strong protections when buying online. While many UK companies will use the same rules post-Brexit – they won’t actually have to – which means consumers here may find it difficult to enforce their rights if they get into disputes with UK retailers.

And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, scam artists have also been quick to exploit the situation and recent weeks has seen a surge in bogus alerts, dressed up as legitimate messages, from delivery companies being sent to mobile phones seeking financial details from unsuspecting consumers.

We do have one very simple solution to all these problems, mind you. Shop local. If you shop on an overseas website your money simply disappears from the local economy. But if you shop on Irish websites, your money gets circulated over and over again in the community in which you live. Thanks to the pandemic. the speed at which Irish companies have been moving online has accelerated giving us all more choice than we have ever had. What’s not to love about that.