I never ever ever ever EVERRRRR thought I'd be writing a blog about BREXIT. Sure, I love to tap away on my keyboard about the latest rules in football refereeing or the big women's footie games of the season but this BREXIT malarkey is totally not my area of expertise... until I became the founder of a business that want's to make women's soccer accessible everywhere (including Europe!).
Regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, I think all small business owners can agree that BREXIT so far has been a bit of a nightmare. There are strange rules about buying and selling goods to our friends and neighbours in Europe and lots of big words and confusing sentences to swallow. We get emails from HMRC all the time with long formatted web pages and videos which don't make sense! Here's the gist (and how I see it) for you guys as our customers...
From a businesses perspective (UK selling to Europe):
With every package we send to outside The UK there is a small label attached (Customs Declaration form) where we're obliged to detail information about what's in the package, the fact it's a sale of goods, the estimated cost of the goods etc.
Now, this is where it gets complicated. From our perspective we have declared the cost of the goods (which in most cases does not reach a threshold concerning to European border forces (aka it's not €500+ value)) but there appears to be nothing stopping EU countries from slapping on a customs or VAT charge or checking the parcel themselves regardless.
We've posted parcels to Italy, France, Switzerland, Sweden and the list goes on and on. I'd estimate we've sent anywhere between 100-150 parcels to Europe. So far we've heard of one instance in Germany where the customer was sent a €20 customs bill by the German government after purchasing from us. One instance is one too many for us!!
It appears there is no rhyme or reason why customs bills are added (the customer in question didn't have a unique order - it was 1 x jersey) but it's pretty obvious there's a lot of politics involved between nations.
We'd love to know if you've been affected by this as a Foudys customer. We may not be able to help with the political landscape but we can certainly try and help out to ease the blow of the annoying fees!
Delays in receiving your order
Another issue we're facing due to (we believe) BREXIT is delays in items arriving with our customers. It's nothing huge but we can see items tracked as leaving the UK within 1-2 days of posting before sitting in customs in Europe for sometimes weeks!!!! on the Royal Mail tracker.
Again, although we can't do much to speed up the customs process we can certainly track it, monitor it and give you all the tracking information so you can see what's going on with the journey of your beloved jersey.
We're sorry for anyone affected by this and please do reach out via info@womensfootballmerch.com to discuss your order with us!
Thanks,
Helen