Customs & VAT.

How cross-border shipments clear customs — Zonos, the EU/UK registrations, and how duties are reimbursed.

Customs handling

Cross-border shipments clear customs with Zonos, which generates the commercial invoice and calculates duties. The team actively manages DDP vs DAP (who pays duty): for India, Swaglogic is used specifically for shipments outside India to avoid customs friction. International POs factor Zonos/customs cost into the shipping decision (ground vs expedited vs air), and cost impacts are communicated to the CSM before upgrading shipping.

VAT & EORI registrations

PerkUp holds local EU and UK tax registrations to ship and bill in-region (these back the EU/UK warehouses). PerkUp has no US VAT.

EU — Latvia:

VAT / Tax reg #: LV90013461727
EORI: LVUS90013461727
Filing: Monthly (EUR); effective 2025-11-03

United Kingdom:

VAT / Tax reg #: GB509036211
EORI: GB509036211000
Filing: Quarterly; effective 2026-01-01

Duty reimbursement

When a recipient or vendor is charged customs duty, it is logged for reimbursement via the Customs Reimbursement Google Form, which feeds the “Customs submissions” sheet (work email, fee, customer, vendor, country from/to). DHL also issues custom-fee payment links that must be cleared (a recurring Order Management task). A reusable Customs Clearance Letter template exists in Drive for authorization.

Duties can be significant — logged examples include $462.70 (USA→Estonia) and $164.44 (Latvia→Uruguay), mostly on Printful shipments.

Historical: EU import problem (2024)

Last verified: needs review. Source (EU - Customs issues) was last edited 2024-08-02 — about 22 months ago. An Operations owner must confirm these steps are still accurate before relying on them.

A 2024 problem doc records why importing US-made product into EU 3PLs was hard: Topshelf could only do DDU (not DDP), had no Power of Attorney, and wasn’t registered to import into Europe, so a Cornerstone guidebook job had to be fulfilled from the US at higher cost. This appears largely resolved by PerkUp’s current EU VAT/EORI registration and the EU (Latvia) warehouse — kept here for context. An owner should confirm the DDP path is now fully in place.

Sources: “Procurement Playbook” (Zonos) & “Creating supplier accounts” (Notion); “Customs submissions” (Drive); “EU - Customs issues” (Notion, 2024 — needs review).