I ship small packages from Canada all around the world and customs and duties are my biggest source of frustration and my largest customer complaint. I ship most packages with UPS and Fedex through the ClickShip integration.
I can see that if I upgrade to Shopify Advanced in the admin I can enable the Duties and Import taxes section and then it says I will be able to “Help international customers avoid unexpected fees by collecting duties and import taxes at checkout.” Then I suppose once I enable this I would go into my Clickship admin and change my labels so the import fees are billed to me directly (DDP) instead of to the customer. Is this correct or do I have to somehow register for duty remittance in every country? What am I missing here? Are there any best practices that should be followed once I enable this?
Thanks in advance for any clarity you can provide!
Hi NimbleRobot
Registration because of duty remittance is never required, duties are paid on entry to the country to customs. But registrations for taxes are often required when you have any reasonable (most cases) sales to the country.
European countries with registration requirements are Switzerland (100 000 CHF annual sales) and Norway (~4.500USD annual sales).
EU and UK do not have a registration requirement any more for distance sales. They do, however, have a simplification in place if your shipments are applicable, value thresholds are 150€ (IOSS) and £135 (UK VAT) respectively. The simplifications allow for significantly cheaper shipping and easy fiscal compliance, substituting DDP.
Some other significant markets
Australia 75 000 AUD
Canada 30 000 CAD
Japan ~67 000 USD
If you need any assistance with sales to EU and UK, feel free to reach out to EAS 
https://apps.shopify.com/eas-eu-compliance
You can setup One Stop Shop (IOSS) for EU and enable shopify advanced to collect, you will have to do the remittance if you collect or work with a carrier that does.
We signed up with OrangeDS https://www.orangeds.com/ to do DDP for us and it has been amazing tbh. The prices they gave us are usually unbeatable, and customers are so much happier with DDP shipping.
We chose to have OrangeDS import on our behalf and then invoice us for the taxes rather than sign up with IOSS and manually remit. We just set a blank tax ID for EU in the collection setup on shopify advanced and let OrangeDS handle the rest.
APG Ecommerce, Cirro, and EPG offer similar services.
If you want to send DDP on Shopify plan without going to advance… one of the easiest ways to get started is to use Easyship and their duty/tax calculator: https://www.easyship.com/taxes-and-duties
3rd party calculated shipping is a small monthly add-on for the shopify plan: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/fulfillment/setup/shipping-rates/third-party-carrier-calculated-shipping
Most of the customs forms will be digital within Easyship and you can use their platform to generate DDP shipping labels anywhere it is supported.
– This option saves you on the shopify advanced fees, but the shipping costs are higher.
If you want an introduction to OrangeDS hit me up, I am happy to connect folks.