upvote
No matter how small the risk is

That's just an excuse then. Register with whatever local authority in your country handles these things and in the unlikely event you get a grumpy letter just send them a copy of your registration documents.

reply
Really sorry you’re experiencing this, that whole regulation rollout is a complete mess. The leadership should be sacked for such an incompetent regulation, it’s insane how much troubles they are creating for small businesses.

Another small business owner reported their experience in this Reddit thread, looks really bad: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1vrz88a/comment/p4i...

I’m as pro-EU as one can get but that’s a mistake we should solve asap

reply
The main reason I'm not particularly pro EU is the following.

How would we even sack the leadership?

reply
Who is the leadership? The Council - then it would be national elections etc for the individual national representatives; the Commission - then it would be the European Parliament.
reply
Requiring a 2/3 majority from the European Parliament seems a bit like a theoretical option more than anything. Even if it did (almost) happen once.
reply
Do you send them as your business or as yourself? If it's the latter, then I would consider forming a business to take on the risk. That's not free either, but think of it as insurance.
reply
Some people did the same when VATMOSS was introduced.
reply
And those people were idiots. MOSS was trivial to implement and an improvement of what was there before. I implemented it myself for our company.
reply
Not far small businesses with very small numbers of cross border sales.
reply
Do you not cross the street given the risk of being hit by a bus?
reply
Fortunately, buses are not invisible and you can look for a bus before crossing a street to gauge and control your risk of being struck by one.
reply
Schrodinger's Bus: You do not know if you will be hit until you are already in the street. I feel like there is some promise in naming a band this, but it is unfortunate it so often is what people have to deal with when bringing an item to market.
reply
... but you can still fail to notice one, and you can gauge and to some degree control your risk of being fined.

In fact, if you sell 10 hobby prototype boards to other hobbyists, you probably have a higher risk of getting hit by a bus on the way to the post office than you do of being fined.

reply
Sorry, that's a really poor analogy.

Because there's a handful of companies (lectronz, seeedstudio, ebay, etc) that have the full shipment lists. So the compliance agencies don't have to go after individual business records one business at a time; they can go to probably fewer than 10 businesses and find the suggested mass rule breaking with a sql join.

See also the national tax agencies with NACE codes (euro version of NAICS).

reply
Umm akchully, not crossing a highway to avoid being hit is a perfectly sane course of action.
reply
except he said "street" not "highway"
reply