EU Customs: Important Information

There are big changes happening with EU customs at the moment. We’re ahead of the game and have completed all the new mandatory requirements. However, these changes are causing some IT errors between some shipping companies.

Who this affects
This only applies to countries where we collect your local tax upfront at checkout. In these cases, your parcel is sent using Royal Mail’s Postal Delivery Duties Paid (PDDP) service, so there should be nothing more to pay on delivery, but this service is having occasional issues right now.

What’s going wrong
When we send your parcel, all the customs and tax information is passed digitally from Royal Mail to your local delivery company. Unfortunately, Royal Mail is having communication issues with some of its delivery partners, most commonly PostNL (Netherlands). Sometimes this information isn’t received, so your local delivery company doesn’t know the tax has already been paid.

When this happens, you may be asked to pay extra charges before or on delivery. Very rarely, a parcel may be rejected and returned to us.

This is an error between Royal Mail and your local delivery company, not something we’ve done wrong. We’ve been advised that the correct procedure is to pay the charge and then claim it back from your local delivery company.

What the extra charges usually are

•Local tax
•A processing or handling fee, which varies by country but is typically around €10 per shipment

A personal note from us
We’re really sorry this is happening. It’s caused a lot of stress and upset for us too. At one point we stopped all orders to the EU because the admin had become too much for our small team to manage.

After lots of kind messages from our loyal customers, we’ve had a rethink. We’d much rather keep selling to you, and we hope you can help us by chasing any claims directly with your local delivery company. Sadly, the only alternative would be to stop selling to the EU altogether, and we really don’t want to do that.

Thank you so much for your patience and support. It means the world to us.

Before you claim (all countries)

•Claim as soon as possible, ideally within 6 weeks of receiving your parcel.
•Keep the packaging and any customs label on it, or take a clear photo. On the label you’ll see a black dot with the letters PDDP inside it. This shows your parcel was sent using Royal Mail’s Postal Delivery Duties Paid service, so these charges should never have been applied. Please include a photo of this with your claim.
•Keep your receipt for the extra charge and your order confirmation from us.

Netherlands flagNetherlands (PostNL)
Request a refund for customs clearance charges. When asked if you’ve paid twice, select Ja (Yes), as the tax was already prepaid through Royal Mail’s PDDP service.

Other countries
Please contact your local delivery company and ask for their customs charge refund process, quoting the PDDP service and including the evidence listed above.