Amazon Notice! US stores also need to upload French tax numbers?

Due to the recent outbreak of the epidemic in Italy, many sellers are currently paying attention to the situation of the European market, and are ready to wait for the domestic epidemic to improve and production capacity to increase before entering the European market to sell a wave of epidemic prevention materials.

However, there was bad news from the European site - the French site required that the French VAT tax number be uploaded immediately, otherwise the store would face the risk of being closed.

In theory, this only requires sellers on the French site (and some other European site sellers that sell in France) to upload their tax IDs. However, a strange situation occurred in our seller group: sellers who had only registered US stores also received emails from Amazon asking them to upload their French tax IDs.

Later, the seller also posted the number of products on sale in his store. Indeed, only the products were being sold in the United States, and even the other two North American sites, Canada and Mexico, were not synchronized.

So why would a seller who only sells on the US site be required to upload a French tax number?

From the information provided by this seller, Amazon provides the sales generated by the seller in France. So the question becomes, why is there sales in France when only the US site is opened?

There is a policy in the background of Amazon - Amazon Logistics Export. The content is very simple. Even if you only open a store in the US site, people from other countries can directly go to the US site to buy products enabled with Amazon Logistics Export, and then Amazon will deliver them to the buyer across borders.

So, if a French buyer's product in the US store is shipped to France by Amazon, does the US seller need to upload the French VAT number or even pay taxes? I found an official explanation in the backend.

The French government will collect the taxes due regardless of where the product is listed.

The result is obvious. Although the seller only has a store in the United States, he has turned on "Amazon Logistics Export" (Note: this function is turned on by default!) . Last year, three French buyers purchased products in his store through this function, resulting in the American seller being inexplicably required to upload a French tax number.

Sellers who don’t sell to the European market certainly don’t want to get involved in VAT. To avoid this, it’s very simple to disable “Amazon Logistics Export” in the background. Because this function is enabled by default, sellers who have not used it must pay attention to it.

Click "Settings" in the upper right corner of the backend page, select "Amazon Logistics" in the drop-down menu, and then find the export settings and disable them.

However, some sellers may still have some orders from non-EU countries, and if they directly turn off the Amazon export function, they may lose these orders.

At this time, you can edit the export restriction list to individually prohibit consumers in certain countries from purchasing products through the export function.

Just like the disabled entry above, you can edit the restricted list below the disabled option. Note that the countries that are checked are the countries that cannot purchase your products through the export function. Don't check the wrong ones. It is recommended to check all EU countries. Some countries may still have orders taxed even if they don't have Amazon sites.

In fact, Amazon’s logistics export function has been around for a long time. It can be said that it is a function with both advantages and disadvantages. And because it is enabled by default as long as you use FBA, many sellers may encounter various troubles without knowing anything.