AliExpress and Irish Tax

AliExpress sometimes give the option of having the goods shipped from an EU warehouse - e.g. France or Spain.

This should avoid the issue, but I wonder does it?

I don't often use those because they are usually more expensive and dion't arrrive any faster.

But when I have ordered items that were supposedly located in Europe they shipped from china anyway bar one.

Mine arrie suspiciously quickly after paying, maybe if I had just waited it would have come like yours 🤔

I won something on ebay and I'm being asked to pay vat at checkout, seller is not with the ebay global shipping programme.

My refund saga continues, was given an escalation number last week, followed up today was told I have to mark the item received before they can deal with it. Marked the item received now I get please click 'chat with an agent now' but no matter how many times you load the page there is no button anymore. If you try to send an email it say you have already contacted them and should get a response within four hours yada yada.

Definitely swings and roundabouts to avoid refunding. Seller has offered to send me equivalent amount of goods as a gift but no guarantee it wont get hit again. Sigh.

Well aliexpress appear to have held or recalled 6 of my packages some ordered on different days, cancelled the original tracking numbers I was issued, and bundle them into a single postnl package which is great. Hopefully the problem is resolved.

It's not up to An Post nor Revenue to rectify an error by the sender. The changes were well known before the enactment date. You need to pursue a refund from the sender.

Good luck with contacting An Post - their level of customer service is very, very poor. You may write but don't expect a reply.

I've had reason to do this from time to time regarding postal items & parcels returned to me despite having the correct postage and being despatched from a local post office. These items get 'lost' in the system and/or they don't deliver them for some reason, so they just send them back. At which point you have to pay the postage again and send them off a second time. You can supply receipts and tracking numbers and so on, but they obviously are completely understaffed for this and your emails or letters of complaint just get binned.

If An Post were a private business with that sort of attitude to their customers, they'd be gone in short order.

But they don't know you've already paid VAT. Your package could come from anywhere outside the EU and contain anything. If it doesn't have the correct details ref. VAT they don't know from whence it came, nor if correct fees were paid. Nothing got to do with them. It's the sellers and Ali's fault 100%

An Post are loosing a fortune with packages from China so they do the minimum necessary on any package from China. An Posts customer is the Chinese shipper, who's not filling in the forms correctly, not the person receiving the package, who's paid the VAT.