WhatSales

Marketplaces to collect VAT from 2027 as FBA fees rise

Written by the WhatSales team

Marketplaces to collect VAT from 2027 as FBA fees rise

The Budget landed the biggest structural change for UK marketplace sellers in years, and it arrived in the same fortnight that Amazon raised its FBA surcharge, the carriers switched on peak pricing and the EU started charging €2 a parcel. None of it is optional, and all of it lands on your cost per order at once.

Marketplaces will collect your VAT from October 2027

Marketplaces will collect your VAT from October 2027

From October 2027, online marketplaces become responsible for collecting and accounting for VAT on certain sales made by UK businesses through their platforms, extending rules that currently only cover overseas sellers and low-value imports. The rules apply to B2C sales by UK businesses that are VAT-registered, or whose annual sales through an individual marketplace exceed £90,000, with the threshold assessed separately for each platform. Personal sales, second-hand goods and B2B transactions are excluded.

The mechanism matters more than the date. Once the marketplace is the deemed supplier, it takes the VAT out of your sale price before it pays you, so the money landing in your bank drops by up to a sixth while your stock cost, ad spend and fulfilment fees stay exactly where they are. Because the £90,000 test is per platform, you can be inside the rules on Amazon and outside them on eBay in the same month, with two different payout shapes to reconcile. Seeing profit by channel, net of fees, is what /profitability is built for.

What to do: pull your last 12 months of sales split by marketplace and test each one against £90,000 on its own rather than as a group total, then model your payout with VAT stripped out. If a channel only works at today's payout, you have until 2027 to fix the price, the product or the channel mix, and /integrations/amazon gives you that per-channel view now.

Peak costs stack: FBA surcharge at 2%, carriers add their own

Peak costs stack: FBA surcharge at 2%, carriers add their own

Amazon's fuel and logistics surcharge rose from 1.5% to 2% on 2 November, applying to fulfilment fees across FBA in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium. It sits on top of UK peak fulfilment fees, which run from 15 October to 14 January and add roughly £0.07 to £0.13 per unit. Carriers have done the same: Royal Mail's peak surcharge runs 2 November to 10 January at 15p on 48-hour parcels and 22p on 24-hour, DPD adds 30p (20p on DPD Lite), UPS charges £0.48 per UK home delivery until 6 February, and Amazon's Evri rate card lists 10p a parcel for November and December.

None of these is big on its own, and that is the problem. A £9.99 unit shipped FBA picks up the peak fulfilment fee and the higher percentage surcharge; the same unit shipped by you picks up the carrier surcharge instead. Add a Black Friday discount and one return, and an item that was profitable in October is selling at a loss in December with nothing obviously broken. You only see it in a per-order view that nets off every fee, which is what /profitability does.

What to do: take your 20 best-selling SKUs under £15, add the new fees to each, and set a floor price you will not discount below this quarter. Then re-check free-delivery thresholds, because a £25 threshold set last year no longer covers the parcel. Use /inventory to see which of those lines you have the stock depth to reprice rather than rush.

Quick hits

  • Multi-channel: Evri has announced a £32.2m investment in depots, technology and automation and DPD has opened a 50,000-parcel-a-day site near Darlington - welcome capacity, but Royal Mail has cut its truck fleet, so book a backup carrier for late November.
  • Amazon: FBA Returnless Resolutions is live in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain for items up to €75 - you set the cap from €1 upwards, and anything refunded this way is stock you never get back.
  • Multi-channel: the EU's €2 handling fee and mandatory product IDs applied from 1 November, charged per HS code alongside the €3 duty - a two-item parcel carries €4 in handling fees, and missing PID data can stall it in customs.
  • Shopify: Editions Fall '26 lets shoppers buy inside ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI Mode from your live stock - check your delivery and returns details in Shopify, because the assistants read them out.

On your radar next week

  • Tuesday 11 November: free eBay UK webinar on eBay Live, for sellers starting out and those already streaming, two weeks before Black Friday.
  • Wednesday 16 December: Etsy's updated Terms of Use take effect, letting Etsy and its partners use your photos and descriptions to train AI tools; the rules banning AI-made craft instructions and requiring real product photos are already live.

Sources

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