Distance Selling is a term that means that a company is selling goods to customers and has no face to face contact to the respective customers
It includes basically all online business and some other cases with less importance, such as orders via Fax or telephone
Typciall cases for distance selling is selling over Amazon and Ebay
Distance selling (online business) is basically what most of our clients do. If you sell across EU memberstates, means from one member state into an other, there are special rules to be applied.
From the legal side it is written down inside the COUNCIL DIRECTIVE 2006/112/EC of 28 November 2006 on the common system of value added tax.
It means that when you running already a business in a member state of the European Union that you can sell to private customers in other EU member states under your local VAT-ID of the business that you have alerady registered inside the EU.
Example: You have a business registered inside Spain. Now you selling also to German customers under the spanish VAT-Rate (21%). As long as the sales volume does not exceed 100.000 € (see table below) you can continue with this practice and you don´t need to register for VAT inside Germany.
Once you exceed a sales volume of 100.000 € (net) you have to charge 19% VAT (German VAT-Rate) and pay the 19% VAT from all your sales to Germany to the German tax office by a VAT-Return. So you need to register for TAX- and VAT-numbers inside Germany.
But there are special rules to get applied, stated inside Article 34 2006/112/EC. So you may not apply this rule for your specific way of business. In any case we would advice you to take legal advice.
Distance Selling Tresholds
| Austria | €35.000 |  |
| Belgium | €35.000 |  |
| Bulgaria | BGN 70.000 |  |
| Chile |  |
|
| Croatia | HRK 27.000 |  |
| Cyprus | €35.000 |  |
| Czech Republic | CZK 1.140.000 |  |
| Denmark | DKK 280.000 |  |
| Estonia | €35.000 |  |
| Finland | €35.000 |  |
| France | €35.000 |  |
| Germany | €100.000 |  |
| Greece | €35.000 |  |
| Hungary | HUF 8.800.000 |  |
| Ireland | €35.000 |  |
| Israel |  |
|
| Italy | €35.000 |  |
| Latvia | €35.000 |  |
| Lithuania | €35.000 |  |
| Luxembourg | €100.000 |  |
| Malta | €35.000 |  |
| Netherlands | €100.000 |  |
| New Zealand |  |
|
| Norway | N/A |  |
| Poland | PLN 16.,000 |  |
| Portugal | €35.000 |  |
| Romania | RON 118.000 |  |
| Slovakia | €35.000 |  |
| Slovenia | €35.000 |  |
| Spain | €35.000 |  |
| Sweden | SEK 320.000 |  |
| Switzerland | N/A |  |
| United Kingdom | £70.000 |  |
