EU VAT for Amazon, Etsy & print-on-demand sellers (2026): the €10,000 threshold and when you must register locally

Selling physical products through Amazon, Etsy or a print-on-demand service feels refreshingly hands-off — until VAT shows up. The platform handles the storefront, the payments, sometimes the shipping, and it’s easy to assume it handles the tax too. For EU-based sellers, that assumption is where the trouble starts. Here’s the plain-English version, with the verified rules, of what you actually owe and when you have to register.

The one number: €10,000

Before July 2021, every EU country ran its own distance-selling threshold and it was chaos. Those were scrapped and replaced by a single EU-wide threshold of €10,000, net of VAT, per calendar year. It covers your total cross-border B2C sales across the whole EU, added together — not €10,000 per country.

• Under €10,000/year total: you can charge your home country’s VAT rate on cross-border B2C sales. Simple.
• Over €10,000: you must charge the customer’s country rate — French VAT for a buyer in France, German for Germany, and so on.

That second line sounds like registering for VAT in 27 countries. You don’t. That’s what the One Stop Shop is for — and it’s worth reading the full EU VAT & OSS explained breakdown if the threshold mechanics are new to you.

What OSS does — and what it quietly doesn’t

The One Stop Shop (OSS) lets you register once in a single EU member state, charge each customer their local rate, and file one quarterly return that reports all your EU B2C sales. The tax authority distributes the money to the other countries for you. For a one-person shop selling digital downloads or shipping from a single home base, OSS genuinely is the whole solution.

The catch — and it’s the one that catches marketplace sellers off guard — is that OSS only covers the VAT on the cross-border sale. It does not cover every VAT obligation you can trigger. The big one is where your goods physically sit. If your stock is stored in a country, that storage can create a separate, local VAT obligation there that OSS does nothing about. Which brings us to Amazon.

The Amazon FBA / Pan-EU local-registration trap

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding for product sellers.

When you use Amazon FBA, and especially Pan-EU FBA, Amazon moves your inventory between fulfilment centres across multiple countries to put stock closer to buyers. That’s great for delivery speed. But the moment your goods are physically stored in a warehouse in, say, Germany, Poland or France, you generally need a local VAT registration in that country — because holding stock there is a taxable presence, independent of where the customer is.

If you sell on Amazon but ship everything yourself from one country (no FBA storage abroad), you avoid this — you’re in ordinary distance-sales territory, threshold and OSS as above. It’s the storage that creates the local obligation, not the sale.

Etsy: you self-manage your VAT

It’s tempting to assume Etsy “does the VAT.” For most EU-based sellers, it doesn’t.

For physical goods sold intra-EU by an EU-established seller, Etsy generally does not collect or remit the VAT — the seller self-manages it. That means you track the €10,000 threshold, register for OSS when you cross it, apply the correct rate, and keep the records.

Marketplaces do collect VAT in specific situations — for example, imported low-value goods brought in via IOSS, or sales made by non-EU sellers. But if you’re an EU seller selling to EU customers, you’re outside those cases and the responsibility is yours. Check your shop’s VAT settings, don’t infer your obligations from a checkout total, and confirm what the platform is and isn’t doing.

Print-on-demand and dropshipping: read the supply chain

Print-on-demand (POD) and dropshipping muddy the picture because someone else holds and ships the goods, and the VAT treatment follows the physical movement, not the marketing.

The questions that decide your VAT position are: where is the product produced and dispatched from, and where does the customer sit? A POD supplier printing and shipping within the EU to your EU customers puts you back in standard distance-sales/OSS territory above €10,000. If goods are imported from outside the EU, IOSS and the supplier’s role come into play instead. The platform’s convenience hides a supply chain you still have to understand — so trace it before you assume you owe nothing.

Who needs what

• Selling on Etsy, shipping from one EU country, under €10k cross-border: charge home VAT, keep clean records, watch the threshold. No OSS yet, no local registrations.
• Etsy/own-shop over €10k cross-border, single home base: register for OSS, charge each country’s rate, file one quarterly return. Etsy won’t do this for you.
• Amazon Pan-EU / FBA with stock stored abroad: OSS for the sales plus a local VAT registration in every country your inventory is warehoused. This is the heavy case.
• Genuinely small and cross-border: weigh the 2025 cross-border SME VAT scheme — under €100k EU-wide turnover it can let you sell VAT-exempt across borders, the opposite tool to OSS.

Whichever bucket you’re in, the practical reality is the same: this maps to needing VAT-aware accounting and invoicing that tracks the threshold, applies the right rate, and produces OSS-ready reports — and, for Pan-EU sellers, sometimes proper formation and a relationship with an accountant who handles multi-country registrations. The right tooling turns this from a quarter-end panic into a setup-once system; I compared the options in the best accounting software for solopreneurs (Europe) roundup.

The takeaway

• There’s one €10,000/year EU-wide threshold for cross-border B2C: below it, charge home VAT; above it, charge the customer’s rate via OSS.
• OSS covers the sale, not your storage. Amazon Pan-EU/FBA stores stock across countries, which forces a local VAT registration in each — on top of OSS.
• Etsy doesn’t remit VAT for most EU sellers on intra-EU physical goods — you self-manage it (track the threshold, register for OSS, apply the rate).
• POD/dropshipping: the VAT follows the physical supply chain — trace where goods ship from before assuming you owe nothing.
• Under €100k EU-wide, the 2025 cross-border SME scheme may let you sell VAT-exempt — the opposite of OSS.
• Practically, this means VAT-aware accounting and invoicing and, for Pan-EU, sometimes formation and a multi-country accountant. More context in the e-commerce sellers hub and the EU admin guide.

Part of the complete EU admin guide for solopreneurs.