How we dispatch pscan.uk units

Royal Mail

For UK deliveries and most destinations outside of the EU we normally use Royal Mail First Class or International Tracked delivery.

Walking to the local post office is convenient and they are super friendly. There is less form filling than other couriers and the costs are the lowest. That's why this is our default shipping method except for customers in the EU.

SAMOS CONNECT

For customers in the EU we exclusively use SAMOS CONNECT.

This is why:-

Since the beginning of 2021 when the Brexit Transition period ended we started seeing huge delays to some countries in the EU. Officially the advice was that we simply needed to fill in a customs form and nothing more. In certain countries this seemed to "break the system" and parcels were taking upto a month to arrive, for no good reason.

We got around this for a few months by using more expensive "express" services such as DHL. From about March things went back to normal.

Then from July 2021 we hit a much more serious problem which was the EUs new IOSS system.

IOSS actually has very little to do with Brexit, and is more to do with EU countries loosing out on collecting VAT on items shipped from one country to another within the EU. If the UK had remained within the EU then as a small non VAT registered company this would still have impacted us. Essentially OSS would have required us to be VAT registered to do business in the EU at all.

In theory IOSS is supposed to be optional; provided that a customs declaration is correctly made each country would still be able to collect VAT from end customers. In practice we have experienced the following:-

The "customs declaration" process can take a month. Just like Brexit it appears to have "broken the system".
Couriers charge the customer an admin fee in addition to the actual VAT.
Customs officials have started asking for random extra information, such as conformance certificates, or financial statements proving the actual transaction amount.
One major courier used a clearing agent in Greece who was only capable of clearing B2B parcels and not B2C despite the fact that the courier asks whether it is B2B or B2C during the process of setting up and paying for shipment. The customer in this instance had to redirect his parcel to his employee and all the invoices needed to be re-issued.
Local customs officers will not necessarily deal with us in English. Typically our customer had to call a local number and deal with them in their local language. Getting the large couriers to help is near impossible.
Relying on customers to handle all of these problems, and pay the VAT and extra charges is a loss of control for the seller. It only takes a customer to not read an email in their spam folder and not make the necessary payment and the parcel gets shipped right back to the UK.
The end customer experience is horrible, and this reflects badly on our business.

The EUs official position is that a company outside of the EU is supposed to register with the VAT office of any country inside the EU and pay the VAT for all shipments into the EU to that one country. That sounds convenient but we found it to be near impossible.

Then we found SAMOS.

SAMOS ship pscan.uk units to our end customers in the EU and handle the VAT for us as part of the shipping charge. This means that customers are not asked to pay anything beyond what we charge them up front.

This means that our units are not stuck in customs or with a courier whilst we wait for customers to pay the fees. It puts us as the merchant back in control and gives customers a much better experience.

It also means that we do not have to deal with EU IOSS because SAMOS handle all of that for us.

As an added bonus SAMOS rates are very competitive.

The only downside is that three to four day "express" delivery is no longer possible; however we feel that (in our experience) no courier is able to reliably offer this anymore unless a business is IOSS registered with an EU tax office.

We are so pleased with the service that SAMOS are providing that this is now the only way that we are prepared to dispatch pscan.uk units to customers in the EU.

For any other small UK businesses shipping to customers in the EU, pscan.uk LTD encourages you to read about the SAMOS CONNECT service here https://samos-e.com/blog/no-ioss-number-no-problem.