Pursuivant wrote:The EU dropped the amount of VAT free goods the other year which pretty much closed the loophole for bigger items.
That was not an EU decision but individual member states can decide what the threshold should be for collecting or ignoring VAT from items imported outside the EU.
Finland recently lowered it from 45 to 22 euro. Denmark almost lowered it to zero for magazines (since millions were being posted into denmark, avoiding 25% tax). The UK recently lowered it to zero for items from the channel islands
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/news/removal-lvcr.htm. Notice that this UK rule doesn't even apply to ALL non EU places, only the channel islands (just like the danish one was targeted directly at magazines).
To the OP you are unlikely to get something back from the ebay seller. Even someone living in the mainland UK should have paid extra VAT on import. Probably as a small seller they get away without charging the VAT but companies like play.com have almost shut up because of this change in the law. The headphones were over the limit for LVCR even a couple of years ago (when it was 18 pounds).
As for the finnish post office's online service - the bad thing about that is that it doesn't identify the package. So if you order several items from outside the EU and you get a letter, you don't know which one they are asking you about so must take a guess when going online which item to tell them about.
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