E-Commerce Profit & VAT Simulator (OSS)

One price, three countries, three margins

The gross price stays the same; the margin does not. The example below runs a single item priced at €29.99 gross: sold on Amazon at an approx. 15% referral fee charged on the gross price, with €8.50 item cost and €3.90 shipping/fulfillment cost. Fee and costs are identical in all three rows — the only variable is the buyer's country.

Moving the same sale from Germany to Hungary costs roughly €1.58 — about 19% less profit, with no change to sourcing, shipping or commission. At 500 orders a month that is close to €800. The arithmetic is unforgiving: VAT is backed out of a fixed gross price, so you divide €29.99 by 1.27 instead of 1.19. The effect compounds because marketplaces charge their commission on the gross price including tax — the fee stays at €4.50 even though net revenue has dropped by €1.58.

What this means for pricing

There are two ways out of the margin gap. Either you keep one gross price across the EU and accept that high-VAT markets contribute less — in which case you should at least know which market contributes what — or you work backwards per country from a target net profit and adjust the gross price accordingly. The simulator supports both: switch the target country and watch the shares for VAT, fee, costs and profit shift. If you ship with Amazon FBA, size the fulfillment cost first with the Amazon Fee Calculator and enter that figure here as shipping/fulfillment cost — the referral fee and the FBA fulfillment fee are two separate line items.

The OSS consequence in your books

Once the EU-wide €10,000 threshold is exceeded, B2C distance sales follow the destination principle and are reported collectively through the One-Stop-Shop scheme. For bookkeeping that means every sale needs an unambiguous destination country and the rate applied there. A single lumped EU revenue figure will not do — turnover has to be split by country and by rate. This is exactly where marketplace reporting breaks down: payouts arrive bundled, and the country code sits only in the transaction reports. Our article on VAT in e-commerce walks through how to set that split up properly.

Where the model stops

The simulator uses the standard VAT rate of each EU country; reduced rates for specific product groups are deliberately out of scope. Fee presets are simplified approximate values carrying an as-of date, item, shipping and other costs are treated as net amounts, and income taxes are not modelled at all. The output is a non-binding model calculation for orientation and no substitute for tax advice — for a binding assessment of your own case, talk to your tax advisor.