OSS, IOSS, and what they do not cover

A multi-country D2C brand, selling direct to consumers from its own webshop into six member states, used to carry six VAT registrations: six numbers, six returns, six filing calendars, each with its own local accountant to chase. Today its stock sits inside the union, and one quarterly return, filed through a single registration at the operating base, covers the VAT on every consumer order shipped across those six borders. The instrument behind that is called OSS, and it earns its keep only if you also know where it stops.

One registration instead of six: how OSS works

OSS stands for One Stop Shop. It is the EU VAT scheme that lets a seller register once, in one member state, and use that single registration to report what the rules call intra-EU distance sales: consumer orders dispatched from stock in one member state to a buyer in another. You charge each customer their own country’s VAT rate at checkout, file one return per quarter, and the tax authority that receives it distributes the money to the other member states. One registration can carry consumer sales into all 27.

Two things have to be true before that sentence works. First, the stock has to be inside the union, and for a non-EU brand the way to hold it there without a customs bill on unsold goods is a bonded customs warehouse under Article 240 of the Union Customs Code: duty and import VAT are deferred while the goods sit under bond, and fall due per order as goods leave, not at the border on a forecast.

Second, a company with no establishment in the EU cannot hold VAT standing by itself. It appoints a fiscal representative: a locally established party registered toward the tax authority on the brand’s behalf, sharing liability for the declarations being right. Fiscal representation is what makes the registration real for a non-resident; OSS is what makes one registration enough.

IOSS is a different instrument

IOSS, the Import One Stop Shop, sounds like a sibling and covers a different transaction entirely. It applies when a parcel ships to an EU consumer from outside the union, and only when the consignment, the shipment as declared at the border, is worth 150 euros or less. The seller charges VAT at checkout, the parcel clears on the IOSS number, and a monthly IOSS return settles the tax. Above 150 euros the scheme simply does not apply, and the parcel goes through a normal import.

That direct-parcel lane has also just become more expensive. Since 1 July 2026, Regulation (EU) 2026/382 adds a fee of 3 euros per item category on sub-150 euro consignments entering the union, and it runs until 1 July 2028; the 2026 reform page sets out the mechanics. The short version is that orders shipped from stock already inside the union are intra-EU sales, not imports, so the fee never touches them.

How this runs at EFC

This runs as one desk rather than four vendors. On the operating base, run together with Warelog, the bonded storage, the customs process, the fiscal representation, and the OSS registration sit in one layer: stock lands in bond, orders ship across the union, and the VAT quarter closes with one return. The full sequence from first conversation to first shipment is set out on how EFC works.

The six-country brand in the opening is not a thought experiment; it ships this way today. When a new brand arrives, this is the desk that answers where the registration should sit, which sales belong in the OSS return, and which fall outside it.

The honest boundary: what OSS does not cover

OSS does not cover B2B sales. The scheme exists for sales to consumers, so the moment a brand opens a wholesale or key-account channel and invoices a business from its EU stock, those transactions fall under the normal VAT rules of the countries involved, handled through country registrations and the fiscal representative.

OSS does not cover moving your own stock between countries either. Transferring your own goods from a warehouse in one member state to a warehouse in another is a taxable movement in its own right, and OSS does not report it; it generally requires a VAT registration in the destination country. Warehouse-network decisions and VAT decisions therefore have to be made together, not in sequence.

And IOSS is not a fallback for either gap. It exists for sub-150 euro consumer parcels shipped from outside the union, nothing else.

So the honest answer to “does OSS cover goods already warehoused in the EU?” runs in two halves. For consumer orders shipped cross-border from that stock: yes, that is what the scheme is for. For B2B invoices and your own stock moves: no, and that is where fiscal representation carries the load.

If your map looks like the brand in the opening, one webshop and a spread of member states, the page to read next is OSS VAT at EFC.