Amazon, VAT and OSS: where the One Stop Shop stops helping

Value-added tax is the part of selling on Amazon that quietly grows more complex the more successful you become. A single national FBA account is straightforward. The moment you switch on a European programme and let Amazon distribute your stock across borders, the picture changes, and the One Stop Shop, which is meant to simplify everything, only covers part of it. This guide walks through what OSS does, exactly where it stops, and the questions to take to your adviser.

What the One Stop Shop actually is

The One Stop Shop (OSS) is an EU VAT scheme that lets you report cross-border sales to private consumers in other EU member states through a single quarterly return, filed in your home country, instead of registering for VAT in every country you sell into. For a German seller that return runs through the Bundeszentralamt fur Steuern (the Federal Central Tax Office); sellers in other member states file through their own national portal.

The idea is elegant. Before OSS, once your sales into, say, France crossed a national distance-selling threshold, you had to register for French VAT, charge French rates and file French returns. Do that across five or six countries and the administrative load became punishing for small sellers. OSS replaces all of that with one return that reports each cross-border sale at the destination country's VAT rate, and then distributes the tax to the right member states for you.

The EU-wide 10,000 euro threshold

OSS becomes relevant once your cross-border distance sales to private customers across the whole EU exceed a single, combined threshold of 10,000 euros per year. This is not a per-country figure any more; it is one EU-wide line. Below it, you may generally continue to treat those sales under your home-country VAT rules. Above it, the destination-country rate applies to each cross-border sale, and OSS is the mechanism that lets you report them all in one place.

Most active Amazon exporters cross 10,000 euros of cross-border consumer sales quickly, so in practice the question is usually not whether OSS applies but whether you have registered and are filing correctly. Whether and when you register is a decision to make with your tax adviser, but the threshold itself is low enough that it rarely stays theoretical for long.

Where OSS stops helping

Here is the sentence that trips up more Amazon sellers than any other: OSS only covers sales where the goods physically move from one EU country to a customer in another. It does not cover domestic sales, and the European Commission states this explicitly. If your product is already stored inside the destination country and is shipped to a customer in that same country, that is a domestic sale in that country, not a distance sale, and it falls outside OSS entirely.

For a pure marketplace seller this feels counter-intuitive, because you never chose to store stock abroad. Amazon did. But VAT does not care whose decision it was; it follows the physical location of the goods at the moment of sale. The instant your stock sits in a foreign fulfilment centre, a share of your sales quietly leaves the OSS umbrella and lands in a local domestic VAT obligation, one that typically requires a local VAT registration in that country.

Pan-EU and the storage trap

This is where Amazon's European programmes collide with the limits of OSS. Under Pan-EU FBA, Amazon distributes your inventory across multiple countries to bring products closer to customers and cut delivery times. Amazon names storage locations in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland, and depending on the programme also the Netherlands. For every country in which your goods are stored, Amazon requires a separate VAT number, precisely because storage creates a local taxable presence.

Once your stock is spread across several countries, a single order can fall into any one of several very different VAT categories. Working out which is which is the whole game:

• Stock in Germany, sold to a German customer: a purely domestic German sale. Reported as normal in your German VAT return.
• Stock in Germany, sold to a French customer: an intra-community distance sale. This is exactly what OSS was built for.
• Stock in France, sold to a French customer: a domestic sale in France. It needs a French registration and does not go through OSS.
• Amazon moves stock from Germany to Poland: an intra-community transfer of your own goods. A separate reportable event in its own right, and again not part of OSS.

That last case surprises people most. When Amazon relocates your inventory from one country to another, no sale has taken place, yet it is still a reportable movement of goods for VAT purposes, with obligations in both the country of departure and the country of arrival. It happens automatically, in the background, driven by Amazon's logistics, and it never appears on a customer invoice, so it is easy to overlook entirely.

VCS, invoices and what Amazon does not do for you

Amazon offers VAT Calculation Services (VCS), and it is easy to assume this means Amazon is taking care of your VAT. It is not. VCS calculates the VAT on each transaction and shows it correctly on the invoices issued to your customers. That is genuinely useful, but it stops there. VCS does not submit anything to the OSS portal, and it does not file returns with foreign tax offices. The reporting obligation, to OSS, to your home tax office and to any country where you hold a local registration, stays entirely with you and your tax adviser.

It is worth separating two things Amazon is often assumed to merge. Amazon may, in certain constellations, collect and remit VAT under marketplace-liability rules (for example for some sellers established outside the EU). But for the everyday EU-established seller running Pan-EU, VCS is a calculation and invoicing service, not a filing service. Treat it as a tool that produces clean numbers, not as a substitute for filing.

ViDA and what changes from 2028

There is relief on the horizon, but not yet. In March 2025 the EU adopted the VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) package, which introduces a Single VAT Registration due to take effect from 1 July 2028. The aim is to let businesses handle far more of their EU VAT obligations through one registration, which could partly defuse exactly the storage problem described above, the local domestic sales that OSS cannot cover today.

The important word is "partly", and the important date is 2028. Until then, today's logic applies unchanged: foreign warehouse means local registration, and OSS covers only cross-border distance sales. The precise scope of the Single VAT Registration, and how much of the storage problem it actually removes, should be checked in detail before you build any structural decision around it. Do not restructure your fulfilment today on the strength of a rule that does not yet apply.

The questions to take to your tax adviser

You do not need to become a VAT specialist, but you do need to walk into the conversation with your adviser knowing which levers exist. Run through this checklist before you meet, and bring the answers with you:

• Clarify your storage locations: where is Amazon currently holding my stock? Pan-EU, EFN, or national FBA only? The inventory report in Seller Central shows the countries your goods sit in.
• Check your registrations: for which storage countries do I already hold a VAT number, and for which is one missing? Amazon requires one per storage country.
• Reconcile your OSS status: am I registered for OSS, and am I reporting my cross-border distance sales completely and on time, by the end of the month following each quarter?
• Separate out domestic sales: which of my sales are domestic sales abroad, and therefore currently not flowing through OSS? This is the most common blind spot, so single it out deliberately.
• Plan for 2028: how will the Single VAT Registration from July 2028 affect my structure, and is there any groundwork worth laying now?

Getting these five answers straight turns a vague worry ("am I doing my EU VAT right?") into a concrete, answerable checklist your adviser can work through with you. OSS remains a real simplification and, for most sellers, the correct backbone. The point is simply to see clearly where it ends, so the sales that fall outside it are handled deliberately rather than discovered in an audit.

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