If you sell goods abroad, sometimes additional costs incur due customs duty and taxes, which have to be paid by the buyer to the customs office of his / her country upon importation. The buyer can find out how high these costs are and what the process is on the websites of the customs office of their respective country. For you as a seller, only one thing is important: you have to supply the right documents when shipping abroad.
In the following, we will specifically address private sellers who only want to sell their used items.
Please keep in mind here, that we, as the Anime Flea Market team, are from Germany. Accordingly, we have written this here from a German point of view, with regard to laws and regulations applicable to Germany. The things listed here are probably handled very similarly in many countries. However, we would like to ask you to inquire the customs office and the mail-order firms of your respective country to be sure.
Customs union
A customs union is an unification of states that form a common customs territory. If you ship within such a customs union, usually there is nothing special you have to pay attention to. Such a customs union is, for example, the European Customs Union, which covers all states listet here.
So if you want to send a package abroad, you only have to check if the target country is in the same customs union as yours and if there are no exceptions. If this is the case, you can send it as usual.
Outside of the customs union
If you want to send a package outside your customs union, you need the listed documents.
A document of the custom office
- You can usually download this from the website of the customs office of your country and also from the websites of mail-order firms.
An invoice or somethin like that (in Englisch or the language of the target country)
To say it simple, the customs only wants to know if it is sending something illegal and how much money has been paid, so they are able to calculate the taxes that may be incurred. The easiest way is to write an invoice for this with the following information.
- your name and your adresse
- name and adress of the addressee / buyer
- bought article
- sales price/s
- Versandkosten
- invoice date
- Important: Do not list turnover taxes or other taxes. As a private seller, such things don’t matter to you.
For Germany
You can download those two forms on the website of the German customs office and you can even download them from Deutsche Post AG with an instruction to complete the forms. By the way, both of them offer help, if you have questions or are unsure.
- CN 22 with a commodity value until 377,22 €
- CN 23 with a higher commodity value
Please have in mind:
Your receipt and customs documents must be attached to the outside of the package with a self-adhesive plastic sleeve (delivery note bag). If customs want to check the documents, they can take them out there without opening your entire package.