Existing VAT and sales tax regimes have not really kept up with the fact that it’s practical and easy for someone to order a single widget directly from the fac

Existing VAT and sales tax regimes have not really kept up with the fact that it’s practical and easy for someone to order a single widget directly from the factory in China and have it turn up at their house. The concept of having an exporter, importer and a dealer between them and the customer is dying out and so I don’t really see other states moving away from doing this. The store rightly says that doing what the UK expects for every country is basically impossible. A more realistic thing that I see happening is that this gets offloaded to the postal services in the same way passenger taxes are dealt with by an airline, who of course do have to deal with 195 slightly different requirements to operate there, as postal services (DHL, UPS etc) already do. The EU is advantageous because at least there is some harmonization happening and they are acting as the clearing house for when this is implemented for intra EU transactions (mid this year).