Utopia Custom PC Export Questions Answered

In this, my new series of blogs, I thought I would answer some of the most common questions, that you, our lovely clients from around the world ask most frequently. Today, I want to talk to our customers who are outside the UK’s sunny shores.

As the old Chinese proverb goes, “May you live in interesting times.”, and I would say that never has our world faced so many challenges on a geo-political front, so this blog could be out of date before I hit the upload button. However, for this moment in time, if you live outside of the UK one of the common questions you will be considering is, “how can I purchase my custom gaming desktop, laptop or workstation, but not have to pay the 20% VAT rate?” Well, let me explain.

For our clients inside the EU, it's quite straightforward. If you run a business, simply provide us with your relative VAT number and business details when placing your order. We will double check this and confirm that we can ship your new system excluding VAT. Importantly for this to work we do need to be able to ship to your registered business address, or at the very least have confirmation from the business owner that they are happy for the system to be shipped to an alternate address. If you are a private customer, who isn’t buying the system for business use then we unfortunately will have to charge VAT on your computer, currently 20%.

Outside the EU things get a little different. We won’t charge VAT on any sales heading outside the EU...great news, but we will need to ship the system to the non-EU address. Yes sorry, you can’t pop over to the UK on holiday and collect your laptop excluding VAT (this is something we get asked quite a lot). You should also be aware of import taxes that may be levied on the item at customs.

The team at Utopia have the delivery costs available at checkout for the 13 countries we ship to most often. If you are not on the list, get in touch and we will happily put together a custom quote for you.

Our warranty is valid worldwide, but please note that shipping is not covered, so if you are buying from outside the UK and in the unfortunate circumstance something does go wrong, shipping costs can quickly add up. Tech support, due to the wonders of the Internet, are indeed available worldwide and we will do all we can to resolve your issue as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Finally, we often get asked by military personnel if we can supply hardware that is VAT exempt. This is great, as we love supporting the hard working individuals that are keeping our world safe, so anything we can do to help, we will. However, we need to charge VAT when the computer is for personal use. In fact even when we supply the military directly, we still charge VAT and they reclaim it back. So while we can’t stop you from having to pay VAT, we can help with extras and discounts when available.

Hopefully this answers all your VAT and shipping questions, if not drop me an email on [email protected] and I will get back to you, as well as adding to this blog to make it more helpful for others.

Cheers,

Craig - Utopia Computers