Russian sellers are sounding the alarm: goods are cheaper at foreign online stores

The state needs to urgently introduce VAT for foreign stores.

The Association of E-commerce Companies (ACIT, unites the country's largest online retailers) warns of a major problem: foreign online stores are rapidly increasing their shipments to Russia and can push domestic merchants out of the market.

Foreigners use the fact that the prices of goods from them are lower than those of Russian stores - and due to this, they insidiously attract Russian buyers.
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By analogy with the recently adopted “ Google tax ”, which introduces VAT for foreign Internet companies, Russian sellers are demanding to introduce VAT also for foreign online stores.

Representatives of AKIT expressed their position on a working group under the presidential administration on Internet commerce, at meetings with the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS).

The problem is acquiring a catastrophic scale: according to the ACIT forecast, by 2020, the online trade in household appliances and electronics (BT & E) will take up 26% of all sales of this product on the Russian market. In the clothing segment, a similar type of trade will grow to 20%, in footwear - up to 17%.

According to official statistics, in 2015 the volume of cross-border retail trade amounted to 220 billion rubles.

“Today, foreign retailers can sell goods to Russia via the Internet without taxes and duties, thereby obtaining an average competitive price advantage of 30%,” said Association President Alexei Fedorov.

Accordingly, ACIT proposes to eliminate this price advantage by setting VAT on foreigners, so that in foreign stores the goods will rise in price by about the same third. Then the conditions will be equal for all.

ACIT particularly emphasizes that the presence of cheap goods in foreign online stores is detrimental to the state. According to the estimates of the association, the amount of under-received taxes from three segments of goods - household appliances and electronics, clothes and shoes - is about 26.6 billion rubles in 2015.

Advisor to the President on Internet problems German Klimenko agreed that the problem should be solved. True, he considers more appropriate a different way of requisitions: to take from the buyer payment for each received parcel, for example, 8 euros. He says that buyers in Germany pay such a fee for receiving packages.

ACIT proposal is not supported by all. For example, the Ministry of Industry and Trade believes that a purchase in a foreign online store should be equated with a purchase in a stationary, that is, an ordinary store abroad. If a Russian tourist travels abroad and buys goods in a store, then this purchase is not taxed in Russia.

From this point of view, the taxation of foreign stores looks illogical. However, the recent adoption of a tax on Google shows that everything is possible in this country. Recall that on June 15, 2016, after six months of discussions and approvals, the State Duma of the Russian Federation made the final decision to raise the tax for foreign IT companies that provide services in the Russian Federation via the Internet. Now, Western Internet companies (hosters, ad networks, search engines, software vendors - if they are granted rights to use software, games, messengers, etc.) must open a taxpayer's office in the Russian tax inspectorate and pay VAT on each sale.

The tax does not apply to online stores that sell physical goods. Representatives of the Association of E-commerce Companies propose to correct this “injustice”.

Some experts believe that taxing hundreds of thousands of sellers, for example, on Aliexpress, to put it mildly, will be somewhat problematic: “Most of them are private individuals selling phone cases. Can you imagine how shallow their turnover is? And levying a tax on an amount of less than 80 euros does not make sense, ”said the head of the National Association of Distance Trade (NADT), Alexander Ivanov.

The head of Y-consulting, Daria Nuclear, agreed with her colleague, although she noted that a certain collective purchase tax should be introduced when users buy goods in bulk, including sometimes for resale in the domestic market.

So in the future we will have many more interesting legislative initiatives.

By the way, the State Duma of the Russian Federation has just adopted the “anti-terrorism” package of amendments by Yarovaya immediately in the second and third readings.