EU Customer Alert

Extra duties & fees at your border

Yesterday, we learned that an order to Germany was held up at the customs for a couple of weeks without noticing us or the customer. It is now being bounced back to us, according to the tracking record.

We started investigating the issue and found out that there is a new EU customs duty charge (on top of the various local VAT) and a yet to be finalised government handling fee on top of VAT for commercial packages entering from outside of the EU. Not all EU countries are implementing it yet and since most of our orders go elsewhere, we haven’t been aware of this abruptly implemented policy.

To avoid any further blockade at your customs because of a fee that your government have yet to decide, and a mechanism by the postal service on how all those taxes, duties and fees can be handled from now on, the only way is to assign the shipping to a courier who can process all such things on our behalf so you do not have to worry about it at all.

We have now suspended all the shipping options except for free shipping⁽¹⁾ to all EU countries. To get free shipping, simply place an order above €260. If you see an alert in the cart or checkout page saying no shipping option, but when there is free shipping in the invoice, you can safely proceed to payment to confirm the order.

All the shipping charges and government fees will be absorbed by us. You all know that our profit margin is very tight. This offer can actually mean an additional 15% discount, if not more.

This is a temporary arrangement until all EU countries have finalised what they want and the details, so we can devise a system to make things automatic and much easier for you.

IMPORTANT

Since our current online billing system has not been set up to charge that additional customs duty, we shall have to manually calculate it according to the new rate. (Please see footer for details of the rate)⁽²⁾

Previously VAT for orders above €150 will be processed by your local post office through a cumbersome procedure. Now since we have the courier to do the job as DDP⁽³⁾, we shall have to bill you separately, together with that new import duty. We shall have the Stripe payment system send you a credit card payment link after receiving the order and the calculation is made. Please bear with us for the inconvenience meanwhile.

We shall update you again when there is new development. Thank you for your kind understanding and patience.

---

Footnotes

1. To customers not in the EU zones, free shipping has actually been available to you once your order hits that threshold, which is different according to your country. Have fun exploring it.

2. Import duty for EU
Currently, the EU has set it at a flat €3 per HS category. HS is a code system for customs declaration so the person examining the cargo know which category of product it is relating to duties and customs control.

For tea in consumer pack size, the EU customs has two numbers:

0902.10 — not fermented, or minimally fermented tea, flavoured or not
To them, that means all green teas, jasmine green teas and white teas belong to this (please bear with their poor understanding)
0902.30 — fermented, or partly fermented tea
To them, that means black teas, oolongs and dark teas (shu or semi-shu Pu’er)

For tea ware, there are three

• 69111019 — Porcelain/china tableware
• 69120023 — Stoneware, such as Yixing, our selections of chachū, etc
• 7013 — Glass tableware

What this means to you:

Suppose you have these items in your cart:

Scenario A

1. Cedar Creek Classic, deep oxidation Taiwan oolong
2. Old Bush Zhilan, bouquet dancong oolong
3. Royal Black, classic black tea from the Himalayas
4. Mini Tuo 2018, shu cha pu’er
5. Wenshan Paochong, light style Taiwan oolong

For this particular order, all five items belong to the same HS code: 0902.30. This means a total of €3 customs duty in addition to the VAT per item.

Scenario B

1. Nishio Matcha Setsubai — 0902.10
2. Sayama Japanese black tea Yume Wakaba — 0902.30
3. Muzha Tieguanyin — 0902.30
4. Old Hong Kong Pou Nei — 0902.30
5. Pasha Old Tree — 0902.10
6. Seiho Tsuzuki: Golden Sakura (the stoneware Japanese teapot) — 69120023
7. Standard Taster’s Mug — 69111019

For this particular order, although there are 7 items, there are only 4 HS codes. This means your government’s customs will charge a €3 x 4 duty, on top of the VAT per item.

Please bear in mind that on top of the VAT and duty, your government is charging a handling fee, that may vary according to each country’s own decision. We shall bear this part of the cost meanwhile.

3. What is DDP?
This is a shipping term for commercial trading, meaning Delivered Duty Paid. It implies that we as the seller will take care of all the logistics, duties and fees etc for making sure the parcel is delivered to you.

For orders below €150 for the EU, our IOSS (Import One-Stop Shop, a strange term invented by the EU) agent used to help us make sure the VAT you paid for each order is transferred to your government. Somehow, they cannot handle the new duty and fee.
Since we still rely on them to be registered with the EU for that consumption tax, and more complicatedly, any order below €150 will trigger a payment from us to them for the VAT, we basically cannot take orders below 150, since they cannot process it for us.

One of our usual couriers, FedEx, which is a shipping option for all of our online orders and smaller wholesales, helps us to handle the various processes and tax and duties submissions with a fee. That is why we have to resort to them when the IOSS agent fails to do their job. Due to all the unknown factors and before we can devise a software to handle such complicated charging process, this seems to be only possible arrangement for the time being.

Thank you again for bearing with the situation.