Two things trip up online sellers more than most: not realising the marketplaces you sell on are already reporting your income to tax authorities (DAC7), and assuming dropshipping has its own special VAT rules when it doesn't — it just makes the existing rules harder to apply correctly.
See also VAT audit support · OSS
01 — DAC7 explained
DAC7 (Council Directive (EU) 2021/514) requires digital platform operators — not sellers — to collect, verify, and annually report seller data to their home tax authority, which then automatically shares it with every other EU member state.
If you sell goods through a covered platform (Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Vinted, and similar marketplaces all qualify), you're excluded from reporting only if you have both fewer than 30 transactions and €2,000 or less in total consideration in the calendar year. Cross either line and you become reportable — there's no partial exemption.
Services, property rentals, and vehicle rentals have no minimum threshold at all — they're reportable from the first transaction. The €2,000/30-transaction threshold applies only to the sale of goods.
02 — Why it matters for your filings
The honest answer: probably, but tax authorities are deliberately vague about how automatically.
Germany's own tax authority (BZSt) states plainly that platform-reported figures are "considered at [the authority's] own discretion when assessing your tax return" — official confirmation that the data is used, without committing to exactly how.
Specific figures sometimes quoted online (e.g. a fixed mismatch threshold that "automatically" triggers an audit) aren't sourced to any official document we could locate. Treat them as illustrative, not as a stated rule.
CESOP (payment-data reporting from payment providers, in force since Jan 2024) is a separate anti-fraud instrument, often lumped in with DAC7 in casual writing. They're related, not identical — a mismatch worth knowing about if you're reading up further.
The practical takeaway either way: whatever a platform reports about you now reaches every tax authority you might owe VAT to. Keeping your own filings consistent with your actual marketplace sales isn't optional risk management anymore — it's the baseline.
03 — Dropshipping VAT
Dropshipping (you sell it, a third-party supplier ships it, you never touch the goods) isn't its own legal VAT regime. It's the ordinary EU chain-transaction rules, applied to a business model that makes them genuinely harder to get right — because the sale and the shipment don't run through the same party.
The mechanism that governs it is Article 36a of the EU VAT Directive (the "chain transaction" rule, in force since 2020): where goods are sold successively — supplier → you → customer — but transported directly from the first party to the last, only one supply in that chain counts as the "moving" supply eligible for intra-EU exemption or OSS treatment. The other supply is a static, locally taxed one — and figuring out which is which is where dropshipping VAT actually gets complicated.
The real compliance trap: the "non-moving" leg of the chain can trigger a foreign VAT registration obligation you never expected — in a country you may never have planned to register in.
04 — Where your supplier sits changes everything
Treated as a standard Article 36a chain: no import VAT, but the place-of-supply analysis above still applies. OSS can cover your own sale to the end customer if that leg qualifies as a distance sale — the supplier-to-you leg is a separate B2B supply.
The classic case (a non-EU supplier shipping directly to an EU customer on your behalf): no EU VAT is due on the supplier's own sale, but the goods are imported into the EU, which triggers import VAT. If the consignment's value is €150 or less, IOSS lets you (or the marketplace, if it's the deemed supplier) collect and remit that VAT at checkout instead.
One confirmed nuance worth knowing: under Article 14a of the VAT Directive, a marketplace facilitating a non-EU seller's sale of imported goods valued at €150 or less is itself deemed the supplier for VAT purposes — and an Italian tax authority clarification confirms this applies "regardless of" the three-party dropshipping structure. The platform, not you, may carry the compliance obligation on that specific leg.
05 — FAQs
No. DAC8 (in force from January 2026) is a separate directive covering crypto-asset reporting. It doesn't change DAC7's rules for goods and services platform reporting — the two are easy to conflate but govern entirely different data.
The threshold is assessed per platform, not aggregated across every marketplace you sell on — so selling below the line on three different platforms doesn't automatically make you reportable, but each platform tracks and reports independently.
Only the "moving" supply in the chain qualifies. Some tax authorities treat the non-moving leg as ineligible for OSS, requiring a local registration in the country where that static supply is taxed — this varies by member state, so confirm your specific chain with us before assuming OSS covers everything.
A 2025 EU General Court case addressed a four-party chain transaction with dropshipping-like facts, confirming the triangulation simplification isn't automatically barred just because a chain has more than three parties — though it can still be denied if fraud was known or should have been known. Beyond that, dropshipping is generally treated as an application of the ordinary chain-transaction principles above, not a separate body of case law.
Tell us your supplier locations, platforms, and customer countries — we'll map exactly which legs of your chain need registration and keep your filings consistent with what's already being reported about you.
欧洲及英国增值税专家一对一沟通
