Collecting duties internationally

Ask Me Anything Q&A Sell Internationally
1

I’ve been selling internationally for years, but it’s always been a pain for my customers. I don’t collect duties, and my customers deal with delays because they need to be contacted by their local mail service and end up paying fees on top of the delays.

I’ve briefly looked into at least collecting EU duties, but it’s a complicated process getting a tax ID.

Is there a streamlined process for collecting/remitting taxes that Shopify supports?

Thanks!
Andrew

2

Hey thanks for asking. We have 2 products that can help make collecting and remitting taxes and duties easier for you.

If your shop is in the United States, you can use Managed Markets. Managed Markets works on a merchant of record model: you sell to an intermediary in the the US. Then that company re-sells to your international buyers. This converts all the tax and duty obligations in the EU into the responsibility of that merchant of record, all of your sales become domestic. That lets you do exactly what you want:

  • collect taxes and duties up front, so buyers don’t have hassle on delivery
  • pay another company to deal with collecting and remitting those taxes and duties, so you don’t need to get your own tax ids in every country you want to ship to

If your shop is not in the United States, then Managed Markets is not yet available. We have another tool that could partially solve your problem in that case. Our duty calculator will deal with estimating import taxes and duties during checkout, and collecting them for you. But using that tool, you would still be responsible for remitting those taxes and duties. In some countries, you might be able to buy a DDP label and get the carrier to deal with taxes and duties at the border. But in other countries like the UK, you do legally need to register and remit taxes directly to the government. So part of your problem would remain.