From July, all parcels arriving from outside of the EU are taxed, regardless of the purchase date

Due to the EU’s common tax amendment, from 1 July all shipments arriving from third countries must be declared and VAT must be paid for them. The tax amendment is also valid for goods that were purchased before 1 July but arrive after the said date.
 
Taxation is based on whether the goods are registered as having arrived in the EU before or after 1 July. The date is fixed in the shipment information once the item arrives to Omniva sorting centre.
 
Omniva warns that the tracking pages of international e-stores may not always display accurate information, meaning that the payment duty may come unexpectedly for some people.
 
“A few Chinese or other third country’s e-stores display misleading indications in the tracking environment, where the first event is that the location of the item is Estonia. In the postal world, this often means that the shipment has exited the shipping country’s export terminal and is en route to Estonia, however, it may still take weeks for the item to actually reach Estonia,” Omniva head of international segment Marita Mägi said.
 
“If the parcel arrives to the Omniva sorting centre after 1 July, it is subject to declaring, regardless of the information in the tracking environment, and the respective duties must be paid for it. The easiest option is to observe this information from the Omniva webpage shipment tracking tool - if the event “at Omniva sorting centre” is indicated for the parcel before 1 July, then the tax amendment does not apply for this parcel,” Mägi explained.
 
According to Omniva, the value of the majority of parcels arriving from third countries is below 22 euros, meaning that most of the parcels have reached the clients without additional taxes and declaring. This situation will change from 1 July and all shipments will need to be declared, regardless of their value. 
 
People across Europe are trying to receive their orders before 1 July, thus there are large amounts of orders and the international parcel flow is overloaded and slow. “Omniva has no way to impact the speed of the parcel arriving to Estonia, but we do everything in our capacity to deliver all items that reach us before 1 July to the clients without additional actions,” Mägi explained.
 
From 1 July, the taxation for small shipments sent from outside of the EU changes, i.e. VAT exemption for shipments sent from outside of the EU costing below 22 euros will no longer apply. This means that if until now it was not necessary to declare goods costing less than 22 euros arriving from third countries (e.g. China or the USA) or pay VAT for them, then from 1 July 2021 these goods must also be declared and VAT must be paid for them.
 
This is an EU-level amendment. The aim of the amendment is to reduce tax frauds and ensure equal competition conditions for EU companies compared to companies located outside of the EU.