Brexit and Import duties for EU customers etc

It is looking likely that the UK and EU will not be able to agree on the terms of any 'free of tariffs' trade deal in time for the end of the current transitional period (i.e. 31 December 2020).

Any customer based in the rest of the EU who wishes to buy Folio Society books might wish to get their order in so it crossed into the EU before 1 January 2021, otherwise there is the potential for liability to EU import duties and hold-ups at EU Customs borders.

Buyers in those countries which are not members of the EU and where their country does not have a trade agreement with the EU (e.g. the USA) should I hope experience no changes to liability to import duties.

This is a complicated subject and I would welcome the thoughts of other members of this group.

This will definitely affect Germany, which is why I already made my orders from FS early on so they'd arrive before this mess. I certainly won't be shopping online in the UK the way I did before. The extra cost as well as the sheer hassle of German customs will see to that.

I'm clueless with economics but what is the speculation on whether the pound will drop come January?

I bought 3 LEs in the past month, 2 from FS directly and 1 from a UK seller on eBay, to avoid import duties to EU in January based on my strong assumption of no deal.

I feel very sorry for small independent book sellers in the UK next year, but sadly will reduce my purchases as the costs increase.

>3 Joshbooks1: Hard to say. The main thing to know about financial markets is that if a change can be anticipated then it's probably already "priced in".

Suppose there were some systematic way to predict that the £'s value will fall on the 1st Jan. Then I'd go out right now and sell all of my pounds today so that I can buy them back next month at a lower price and thereby realise a profit. But the very act of me (and everyone who has the same idea) selling all of our £s today is going to drive down the price today by the usual laws of supply and demand. So our prediction for a price fall on the 1st Jan is self-defeating because as soon as we think we can predict a price movement in the future the price movement will happen right away instead.

This basic idea that all information gets immediately built into the price is known as the efficient markets hypothesis. Strictly speaking, it isn't quite true. But it's close enough to being true that ordinary people stand no chance of "beating the market" on the basis of publicly available information.

Potentially interesting aside: One way that you could beat the market is if you could act on new information before everyone else does. But big financial firms spend billions to move their servers a few centimeters closer to the exchange's servers because that means the data doesn't have to travel as far down fibre optic cables, which will allow them to buy/sell a nanosecond faster than other big finance firms in the next server rack over. That's not a game we can play (I'd rather spent the billions on books!)

Expect price movements when new information comes out (e.g., when we know for sure whether there's a last minute deal or not) but not (predictably) in early Jan.

>3 Joshbooks1: The £ sterling is expected to fall against other major currencies. We have been harder hit by Covid that most of our peers such as Germany and France.

At least the £ Sterling has a long term future which is more than can be foreseen for the Euro...

>5 ubiquitousuk: Very interested and thanks for the information - totally makes sense. I just live in ignorance and fool myself that collecting folio books is a smart investment when everything crashes. Logical and very practical I must say!

>6 English-bookseller: Haha ya the USD isn't doing so hot either. At least Europe thinks Covid actually exists.

I'm in the same boat as >2 SF-72:. I don't think the 7% would impact my buying habits that much, but the hassle of going to the customs office will prevent a lot of small purchases.

As FS seems to be shipping books through spain it's possible that they import the books into the EU, but that is pure speculation.

>9 c_schelle: Just curious. Why do you need to go to customs office? Doesn't the carrier like DHL or the postman usually charge the customs on behalf of the custom office?

>10 bookish_elf: I think it's mostly because the customs declarations are not correctly filled in by the sellers. I have to bring my proof of purchase with me and they calculate the fees using that. I also prefer it this way as DHL has a 27€ fee to do the customs declarations. This is especially bad for small orders, which I have limit now. I don't think this will have a substantial impact on big sales oders from FS.

Being in the US, if there is a no deal exit adversely affecting Ireland, as our President-Elect has indicated England will be last on our US list for trade agreements. I have loaded up on FS books this past year in case of the worst. The FS has already been overcharging the US customers for years outside of the shipping charges.

It means that I’ll buy less FS books, as extra cost and hassle will deter me.

I sell on ABE Books and for some non-UK markets they have agreed with the Customs authority of that particular country to collect VAT duties or consumption taxes at source (which ABE remits to Customs).

When I sell to Australia, for example, the ABE Books manifest which I stick on the parcel shows that GST has been paid and it gives some official reference.
The system seems to work without any noticeable difficulties.

Maybe Folio should look into selling on eBay. As someone in a country with sometimes hard to predict taxes and duties (Canada) I find eBay’s global shipping program to often be the most convenient way to buy a book from abroad, as it makes the cost clear up front and avoids paying captive audience collection fees to courier or shipping companies. I’ve had UPS and similar companies charge collection processing fees higher than the tax or duty collected several times.

Rumours abound that in the event of a no-deal the Bank of England will cut interest rates and go negative. The pound will definitely fall in response to this. The pound has barely moved this week as currency traders believe a deal will be done. However the betting markets changed from there being a 33% chance of no deal on Monday, to being 64% on Friday

>15 abysswalker:

Unfortunately, judging from books I was interested in (and didn't buy) recently, ebay's global shipping system charges at least 4 times as much as the actual German customs fee, sometimes more. It used to be a smaller hidden fee, but as it is I stopped making international purchases using their system as soon as customs fees are involved. That's already lost me some of my favourite US sellers and will certainly cost me more with the UK. Unfortunately, a lot of sellers buy into their promise of making things easier and better not just for them (which is certainly true), but also for the customers, which it isn't for my country at least. In addition, you pay shipping twice - one fee for the seller shipping packages to ebay's global shipping system, then their fee for sending it to you. In a lot of cases that's also a lot more expensive than what sellers used to charge for shipping internationally themselves.

>17 SF-72: eBay’s GSP is costly, but still running effectively in these times. That’s where the advantage lies.

>18 NLNils:

Not to me. I've got a serious problem with them excessively overcharging on what's supposed to be customs fees and they actually slow the shipping process down in a lot of cases since there are two steps involved (the seller shipping to them, then them shipping to me) as opposed to direct shipping. As long as sellers use a good transport service, that works as well or better than this in my experience, even during covid. As I said, I don't buy from US sellers who use them any more and won't for the UK either unless their way of handling customs improves to the previous level.